Thinking from Opus Psycheia

The Coach or The Course (Part II)

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 12:21:25 GMT

The Coach or The Course (Part II)

However well designed, courses are general principles which usually run into conflict with every day realities in the business world. The difference between the coach and the course comes down to learning styles.

Courses make you feel as if you know something or have learned something. When you come to apply this to business, your learning can quickly vanish into thin air. So what did you actually learn? Courses give you principles, but they cannot give you application. That is something you have to do personally. When you can't, you need a coach. Coaching is a different type of learning.

A coach helps you to achieve application of principles or knowledge that you cannot put into action. Sometimes this is because you have personal resistances that you cannot see. At other times, it is because your business environment is far too hostile and brings down all the things you have learned on the course.

The coach aims at personalising your learnings, materialising your goals, and "making it happen". This requires insight, knowledge, understanding, and most of all, a sense of judgment and perspective that you cannot have because you are in the middle of everything.

The best sports coaches are never world champions or title holders. Their coaching is based on seeing what is needed. That "sight" is actually "insight". The coach is a reflective mirror who sees you as you are, not how you like to think you are. They are armed with techniques and toolkits that can release you into your own progress in well defined stages. They also "see" the resistances in your business context. These can depend on company size or how you manage critical business relationships with staff and customers. And they know how far they can take you before you need another coach.

If courses are working for you, keep going. But if you're reaching the end of the road, make sure you make the smart move and find coaches to help you on your journey.

The Coach or The Course (Part I)

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 12:11:53 GMT

The Coach or The Course (Part I)

Who needs a coach when you can go on a course? The business world is awash with courses. Online, webinar, YouTube, blogs, company seminars, in-house, out-sourced, professional/ institutional accredited qualifications, certificates and diplomas, continuous professional development, books. There are a myriad courses within each of these outlets for which a business person becomes a consumer target. So who needs a coach when you can figure things out yourself?

The idea that you can do everything on your own is a specific mental state. And it's not "narcissistic". It is a state known as "omniscient fantasy" – the feeling that you have a God-like ability to control your future and create it alone. It is a hugely driven, manic, high-energy, high-octane, secretly determined, obsessive lifestyle. Your mind is constantly filled with noisy lists of things to do, emails to read/write, calls to make, goals to set, goals to reach, customers and staff to please – and courses to go on.

Courses can have a very beneficial impact on broadening your horizons or opening new possibilities. Sometimes they are professionally necessary. They demand discipline and sacrifice of time that can bring rewards and returns to your business world. In the short-term, they can get you through a stuck place.

Strangely, this does not apply to professional sports. In sports, the coach is absolute. The coach literally defines your professional capacity, level and ranking. The greats in the sports always speak of the coaches who mentored or inspired them to move to the next level. They are also unafraid of changing coaches when the time is right to do so.

So why does the same not apply to business?

Spot the Coach

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 22:09:21 GMT

Spot the Coach

Success in sports has always been based on who trains you. A good coach paves the way to your future career. The same principle applies to business coaching. But how do you spot the coach?

The business coaching industry is awash with two extremes. At one end are the “life coaches” who apply personal experience and insights, pop psychology and enthusiasm, to help clients move through a stuck area of their lives. At the other extreme are business coaches who work with standard packages and cannot understand or solve your problem outside their particular box. They either work for coaching organisations or assert their previous experience at Director level. Both types of coach claim they use “proven formulas that work”.

However, formulas that work for others may not work for you. Likewise, a coach that has no method or toolkit at all leaves you on a jolly but futile meandering in relation to your business. You should feel happy to outgrow or end your coaching, and move on to different coaches when the time is right. Good coaches are non-possessive and will help you to do that. They also customise and adapt their toolkit and methods specifically for you.

Here are some guidelines to identify the right fit of coach for you:

• Understands your specific business context and what YOU want to achieve.

• Sees your personal resistances and works on your inner mental game.

• Is compassionate and insightful with your limitations.

• Increases your control of business processes.

• Applies your learning and development to your closest business relationships.

• Helps you integrate your brand values [insert link to brand post above] with how you operate professionally.

• Has the technical competence to deliver results.

Here are some red flags for you to time your exit with your coach:

• They impose their own vision, aspirations, goals onto you.

• They force fixed formulas without objective evaluation, assessments or listening.

• They recycle personal beliefs with no application to the business context.

• They are inappropriately demanding, critical, dogmatic or inflexible.

• They make you feel a failure or a disappointment when you don’t please them.

• They are possessive and controlling, unable to end their work with you.

To discuss your coaching needs, get in touch now.

Brand vs Trend

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 21:47:32 GMT

Brand vs Trend

Social media bends our minds into trends. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) rules. The trend is now the cash cow that no business can afford to miss.

We all enjoy riding the wave of short-term thinking and quick gains. As with all waves, a crash has to follow because there is no underlying structural growth. Underlying growth is a huge psychological problem. Our business minds are conflicted between the temptation of quick cash raids and gain compared to the hard work of long-term stability in revenue growth.

If your business model relies on generating long-term structural growth, the trend is never as important as the brand. The brand is what a company aspires to, it’s ideal operational and service delivery, it’s unshakeable values towards all stakeholders of staff, customers, management and investors. But how does a brand bring in revenue? Why do brands work?

Brands are a guarantee of stable values in an uncertain world of fake information and “alternative facts”. They push a company to guarantee concrete deliverables to customers. To do that, brands force a company to take pride in their workforce, providing them with the best environment to deliver high performance. And because brands are an ideal position, represented in the logo, Mission Statement and company charters, they guarantee endless growth and adaptation based on their purchasing customers rather than trends.

The movement of customers is different to the movement of trends. Customers change or develop buying habits based on what they need. Companies with strong CRM move with and anticipate next generation products and services, retaining the memory of the brand in the customer’s share of mind and share of wallet. This is a long-term relationship between company and client base that runs counter to trending, because it is based on delivering values.

Because trends lack values, aiming only to exploit the moment, they crash and are forgotten. The brand endures. One is fake and flakey. The other sustains and grows.

Does your company need a brand identity? G et in touch now.

After Covid

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 14:56:42 GMT

After Covid

For companies who have emerged intact from the Covid crisis, new strategies of adaptability, innovation, and getting ahead of the curve have been allowed in previously unthinkable ways. Every company and organisation had to invest in their workforce and customer base requirements and make changes under duress.

It became clear without doubt that the workforce and the client base define the existence of any business. Stimulus cheques aplenty have appeared like unicorns, even though we can’t find the magic money tree where those unicorns live. The unicorns have shown where business ‘value’ resides.

Researchers at McKinsey are predicting that after the euphoria and triumph, there will be a huge cost to businesses regarding the wellbeing of their workforce that may continue for the next two years. The adaptability and change, including the intrusion of work into private homes and private life, have created an increase of stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety and complete burnout. This is predicted to result in withdrawal from work through illness, absenteeism or poor performance. It is aggravated by managers and Board members who proclaim triumphant results when the workforce is depleted.

Covid provides an opportunity for leaders to reconnect with their workforce in new and different ways. Leaders can find new interactions that recognise and support the mental and emotional realities of what their own people have lived through. Innovative solutions to make use of mental health strategies (EAPs as a minimum) along with group work can restore or revive a leader-team relationship after the crisis.

The shift in leadership is from the braggadocios to empathy. What can you do to connect with your workforce?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Data v Culture

Wed, 27 May 2020 11:24:37 GMT

Data vs Culture

The turn to IT driven organisations was in the name of efficiency and improved productivity. If we see the data, we can make more informed decisions and develop software that automates tasks in a fraction of human time. Or so we were told.

The reality has shown a shift of inefficiency onto IT processes, typically over budget, drastically behind time, increasing silos and departmental conflicts, with a low quality delivery that is out of date or behind the market by the time it is put into operational use. What's going on?

Whilst data is sold as the gold of organisational high performance, the problem lies with the manipulation of data, now occurring on a worldwide scale at the highest levels of political and social organisation. Businesses are not exempt from this epidemic. Data is highly vulnerable to distortion where self-interest, self-promotion or power interests (for Board Directors or shareholders) use data to do the opposite of its function to reveal facts. The world of messaging and creating messages that sell has a greater force than a world of data that reveals the facts of an organisation.

In business, such distortion will be fatal in the long run. But by then, the culprits have left the building to pursue the next step in their careers.

This has shifted a new burden of responsibility onto people and culture. Data is meaningless without cultures of high trust, transparency, open communication and team structures with leadership that are supportive rather than punishing regimes. W. Edwards Deming asked us not to blame people, to eliminate fear and look at systems and their processes instead. To state the obvious: culture rules data.

The institution of cultures of transformation, high quality, high performance, involve people first. Without such cultures and work ethic, data is meaningless and twisted to a personal gain. Equally, cultures cannot thrive on their own without the facts of the business: the data. Software systems and process efficiencies do need to be developed as reliable reports. But even here, conflicts in data hiding between development and operational teams are commonplace, ironically, where Agile and project management are used.

Change management requires tools in psychology and business process engineering to hold both processes in place.

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

The Activity of Change

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 11:34:48 GMT

The Activity of Change

What is the critical activity that constitutes Change Management (CM)?

A helpful image that defines it is "the mirror".

For a mirror to work, it has to stand outside of you. It also has to reflect. The value of seeing things reflected clearly is that accurate information about the current state can be evaluated, however difficult or unexpected. This brings honesty, clarity and purpose in decisions about the future and what needs to be done. For CM activity to be effective, it has to be located outside of the business to work as a mirror.

But what exactly is being "mirrored" in CM? Operational delivery and customer experience indicate the true nature and values, the experiential reality, that drives any organisation. This focal point is split off from the layers and layers of management that give out orders and instructions, stuck in selective and edited data reports. The splitting between management, staff and customers is what cannot be "mirrored" from within the business, and has to be seen from outside.

Could your business benefit from the "mirroring" of CM?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Shareholder finance & strategic change

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 11:45:13 GMT

Shareholder finance & strategic change

Aug 20, 2019, NYT headline, David Gelles & David Yaffe-Bellany: ' "Shareholder value is no longer everything", top CEOs say.'

Supported by Julie Sweet (Accenture North America), Tim Cook (Apple), Brian Moynihan (Bank of America), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mary Barra (GM), Larry Fink (Blackrock) and Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase). This is the grim reality of changing the domination of financial values alone in corporate and business strategy that is now being recognised as a global necessity if capitalism itself is to survive.

As argued in previous posts, companies driven by financial values alone merely create the foundations of toxic cultures that spill into every aspect of employee engagement and customer experience. They embed chaos, conflict and negative competition within business structures. The full blown Hollywood screen on which this is all acted out is of course the Stock Market.

The burden of change management is to create the profound structural shifts required, not to eliminate financial values, but to balance them with staff and customer operational realities. For the aspirations of "top CEOs" to succeed, change management has to be part of strategy.

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

What makes change in business "good"?

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 19:29:03 GMT

What makes change in business "good"?

Without strategy, change is chaotic and highly conflicted. There can be excitement in such business environments where "change for change's sake" rules the day. But these environments are not sustainable and eventually require a structure that strategy provides.

Change towards structure and strategy can appear "good". But strategy is dominated by financial values. These financial values stop chaos by protecting against losses and finding profitability. Financial domination brings structure, but then frustrates businesses because growth, maintenance and upgrades and valuing customers are seen as costs and losses rather than infrastructure necessities. Each department competes against others for resources. Personalities fight each other in corridor and email politics. Strategy is torn apart in leadership.

The failure of financial values is that they repeat chaos on a much bigger scale. The biggest scale on which we see this acting out is the stock markets. Finance normalises chaos and conflicts, embedding them in business structures, because all that matters are the numbers. As long as the numbers work and targets are reached, nothing is allowed to change. One day, one week, or one financial quarter later, everything can change because the numbers are not met and company valuation plummets.

The foundation of toxic cultures that grows in business cultures lies in the rule of numbers and the domination of financial values that don't understand change in people and business structures. To produce the numbers consistently, "good" change must include the last two.

How does your business evaluate change?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Change Management and CRM

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:56:47 GMT

Change Management and CRM

In the mid-90s, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a thing. Strategic formulation based on Brand integration with database marketing had appeared in the literature. CRM was not an idle piece of software. It was a customer centred, customer focused, customer attuned and organisational evolution of strategy.

No one listened to the customer then, and no one listens to the customer now. Senge (2006) cites examples where the Marketing Senior VP warns the company about necessary changes, only to be ignored or dismissed by senior financial staff, to the ruin and collapse that had to follow. Recently, a "people analytics" expert claimed that only through advanced software was it possible to see why a company kept losing its biggest clients. This kept occurring every time a major Health and Safety accident occurred, resulting in a loss of confidence in the supplier and their standards. Any Marketing Manager, Director or VP would have applied the obvious 101 response: ask the customer.

This staggering blindness and wilful ignoring of customers and what they mean to business strategy persists in Board rooms. The arrogance of financial values that do not understand business growth through customer relationships, resort to cost cutting, asset stripping, sale of business or acquisition of business, destroying the singular most important element of any business: the customer. At Opus Psycheia, CRM is the fulcrum from which organisational or business change is analysed and presented.

How does CRM formulate your business strategy?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Change Management as integrating concept

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:56:41 GMT

Change Management as Integrating Concept

Following my previous posts, Change Management (CM) cannot just be about HR and people analytics. Nor is it about implementing pre-determined project management. Nor a sales and marketing engagement with the admittedly crucial dimension of customer experience or CRM.

CM cannot be stuck in any of these boxes, for to do so will miss change in different parts of the business, skewing or invalidating outcomes that were hoped for.

CM can only combine HR, CRM and operational delivery if it has a relation to company strategy. Those strategies can be making the company attractive for a sell off or M&A, to increase growth and market share, or to stabilise gains through operational and department efficiencies, productivity and staff retention. But without a strategy to work to or reference, CM cannot have a meaningful outcome. It will be irrelevant.

This poses a threat for those responsible for strategy, because of their belief that only they understand the right one for the business. Whilst they will always have superior expertise, experience and industry knowledge, the capacity to reflect on themselves and other department heads is a psychological capacity, hard to achieve when you are inside the box.

How does your strategy achieve reflective strength?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Change Management and HR

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:53:00 GMT

Change Management and HR

In the mid-90s, Human Resource Management (HRM) was a thing. Hope and aspiration were invested in learning and development as the drivers for success in any size of business.

Despite the optimistic literature, HRM didn't reach strategy. Instead, it became reduced to Personnel and Employee Relations law that protect companies from litigation and bad practice rather than develop staff. The crisis had to unfold. Now, talent management, leadership and staff retention have resurged as necessary success factors that deliver profits, innovation and stability. But this is still kept out of reach of strategy where financial values alone dominate.

Change Management picks up the pieces that HRM left behind decades ago. It is a laser sharp focus on the true wealth of any organisation which is not in financial values and profits, but in people who generate those profits and values. The dynamics of company interactions internally and externally are hinged on understanding change. Change is the ultimate resource of any company, and a gateway to the missed point.

How does your company manage and relate to change?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Change Management vs Project Management

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:25:03 GMT

Change Management vs Project Management

Numerous jobs roles are advertised as "change management" - managers, consultants, boutique firms. Hardly any refer to strategy. Instead, there are long lists of tasks to push through pre-determined managerial decisions or "change formula", identical to project management. Why is change management different?

The idea of "change" requires a continual analysis of movement, shifts, strains, stresses, breakdowns, breakthroughs and innovation based on a discipline of reflection. If the change agent is not allowed to analyse the functions of a business, there can be no assessment of what change needs to occur, where and why. Instead, the management that produced the problems embedded in company functions extend their legacy and remain blind or resistant to change because...they are the problem.

It requires the independent thought and analysis of change management to inform the company of where its problems lie, leading right through to Senior and Board level strategic formulation. They have no political or financial agenda in the company. They have the freedom to identify what matters to the business rather than individual interest, and make strategic recommendations accordingly.

How urgently does your business need a change management review?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

The financial domination of strategy

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:17:35 GMT

The financial domination of strategy

Strategy is dominated by financial values alone. Profit reports drive stock market and company valuations as proof of success. Falter here, and the entire value of your business can plunge.

It is assumed that people and processes must be performing well if there are profits, and that customers must be happy. What we often discover is that huge instability, fragility and strain/stress underlies the profits results. Why, then, are staff and customers eliminated from strategic formulation for business growth? A business cannot exist without profits, staff and customers. The error of strategy is to surrender all our thinking, feeling and sentiment to financial values alone, giving it power that then becomes distorted - a distortion that runs through the organisation. Strategic success occurs when all three existential elements of a business have an equal distribution of resource, power and attention.

This balance is difficult to obtain when working inside the business, as it needs the discipline of REFLECTION. Change management consultancy provides that reflective mirror, not seeking to impose predetermined formulas, but to "see" the elements of business in equal proportion, ensuring they work together. Strategy is the essence of change management work.

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Strategy as a concept that integrates

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:13:14 GMT

Strategy as a concept that integrates

Strategy is increasingly looked down on by researchers because it is seen as remote, out of touch, out of time, not data driven and coercively top-down in the way it is formulated and delivered. It barely recognises deep structural conflicts between different functions, teams and departments, which extends to leaders who should bring direction and meaning to the workplace. Leaders and the business structures in which they work have little room or time to resolve these natural conflicts that arise.

Those who pay the price for missing or ineffective strategy are staff and customers, where attrition rates are high with both. But business functions and leaders cannot be understood separately from each other. They have to integrate to create stability and secure growth. Hence strategy is not a remote abstraction, but an attempt to find a CONCEPT that holds all these elements together, whilst providing a forward movement and direction. Any meaningful change management works within the boundaries of the concept.

How does your strategy integrate your leadership with your specific business dynamics?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.

Defining strategy without operations

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:42:41 GMT

Defining strategy without operations

In my posts elsewhere, I noted 5 business functions in which ONE usually dominates strategy formulation. However, the most important internal function was left out and made invisible from the list. Can you see what it is?

Finance & Accounts
IT
HR
Marketing
Sales

A business cannot exist without OPERATIONAL DELIVERY. Whether this is production or a service, how a business performs and delivers for customers reflects the true worth, value and brand equity of the company. Yet those involved in operations or order fulfilment are the most neglected in the formulation of company strategy. They are invisible in the Board room. One of the functions listed above will dominate. Staff and employees know their managers better than anyone else, because they spend so many hours with them. They also know and interface with customers better than anyone else, because they have to deliver on order fulfilment or the fall out when things go wrong. Change management is an attempt to redress this imbalance in business strategy.

So where do we start when we try to design or implement employee engagement programmes or workforce motivation? And how could this become a crucial input in the definition of STRATEGY?

If you are a business leader looking for strategic implementation, transformation or a business review, get in touch now.