Reflections on a very busy week!

Wow, what a busy week! It may only have been four days long but it felt like the longest one ever! I learnt so much this week as well – and I don’t just mean about the processes I was mapping – but rather reading between the lines and gaining some deeper understanding.

Wednesday marked the beginning of two days of process mapping communal repairs. We had a mixture of people in the group from different departments as well as a resident, who provided the necessary challenge to our broad generalisations. “Residents always want this….” was met with “Er, no they don’t, some want this….” (or words to that effect).  He provided the necessary checks and balance to “group think”. A good mix of opinions, although it is fair to say a few times the debate got a little over-heated!

On Thursday I made my way to Leytonstone to the offices of a partnering contractor – a bit of a mission via the train with the large *CSI black bag* (now infamous), then in the rain avoiding the enormous puddles. This time the group comprised some of my maintenance colleagues and people in varying roles from the contractor’s end. The discussions in this group generated a “creative tension” as people saw the problems in the system from different perspectives – like two sides of the same coin, perhaps? (my favourite metaphor). It was a productive team and a productive day – I got what I needed from the group and I feel like the day wasn’t just about identifying issues in a process: perhaps more importantly it was about building on and strengthening the relationship between us and them. For instance, I overheard one conversation where two people who had spoken many times on the phone and via email but never met in person realised who each other was – that “a-ha” moment. From personal experience I know that once you know what someone looks like, it makes it a little bit harder to blame them for a problem as they’re no longer a faceless entity.

So, the thing that I’m keen to explore further here is about breaking down preconceptions and doing away with blame to create harmonious relationships with a shared common goal: Blame occurs whenever we work in silos and lack understanding of what each other does.

I’m also going through a phase of reading self-help books. Some people scoff and turn away when they hear that phrase “self-help”, but they’re the ones that are too proud or scared to learn something more about themselves. A good friend of mine says that “inner space is the new outer space” – we’ve learnt far more about our external environment than we know what goes on inside our own heads! Self-help books are a way of exploring the inner psyche to understand more about how and why we think like we do. I think there are obvious ways to relate those teachings to how we interact at work – we are all people, we all have different psychologies, so of course there is some learning to be had here!

My favourite one at the moment is Susan Jeffers Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. In case you haven’t read the book a quick synopsis is how all fears can be broken down to just one fundamental – that you cannot handle whatever it is you’re afraid of. Jeffers states this is pure nonsense. You can, of course, handle whatever happens. But the chatterbox inside our head will feed our subconscious a torrent of negative statements, trying to drive us crazy. And the sad part is, our subconscious listens to this endless attack and inevitably ends up believing it. So we talk ourselves into feeling low and bad about ourselves, that we’re not good enough to do x so we will keep on doing y, and believe that we are never going to achieve great things or indeed happiness. The chatterbox erodes our self-esteem worse than anybody else you will meet in person.

This low self-esteem creates a situation where we end up playing the victim, blaming others for the cause of our problems. When we blame others we are giving away responsibility for our happiness to someone else – we are giving away control! We are told as we grow up to “take responsibility” for what happens, good and bad, and we think in our adult lives that with buying a house, starting a family and working in our chosen professions that we are “taking responsibility”. But that’s not what it’s about, because actually we can all be guilty of not taking responsibility. Here are some statements that Jeffers asks us to consider to see if we are really taking responsibility for our lives:

“Taking responsibility means never blaming anyone else for anything you are being, having or feeling”.

“Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself”.

“Taking responsibility means being aware of where and when you are NOT taking responsibility so that you can eventually change”.

 “Taking responsibility means being aware of the multitude of choices you have in any given situation”.

So, to relate this back to work, a common problem I hear from people is that “nobody takes ownership in this process”. Everybody seems to be handing off ownership to somebody else, who in turn hands off ownership to another. So this is a situation, to put it simply, where NOBODY IS TAKING RESPONSIBILITY.

With nobody taking responsibility, we are not in control of what’s happening; we are blaming each other for when things go wrong without realising that we were in control of the events leading up to the problem arising and we should have been aware of the choices we could make at that time. Our organisations are suffering from low self-esteem! Somewhere, in the neurochemistry of our companies there exists a chatterbox, which is feeding the organisational subconscious damaging negative messages.

Which leads me to ask this question:

What is it that the organisation is so afraid of that it doesn’t believe it will handle it, if and when it comes along?