I've noticed recently that nearly all my posts since I restarted blogging have been about church and spiritual matters. So I thought that it was time to ramble on about some other matters that matter to me.
I've just won some money to fund a small research project looking at how people learn in their professional careers, especially within organisations. Too often, it seems to me we offer people something called 'management development' which really means that we try to teach them some ideas about being a manager and about what the business world is like. There are several problems with this approach. First, we really don't know what makes a good manager - we kind of know one when we meet one but then we meet another who is totally different. It's very difficult to work out what the key principles are, even if there are any! Secondly, fewer and fewer people are in what conventionally were called management roles - we have 'flattened' organisations and, increasingly, we are in teams, often with very flexible boundaries. As an example, I don't know who my boss is. Jane is my Centre Head, but most of my teaching is done in Mike's undergraduate programme, I work closely with Mark (head of taught programmes and interested in practice based learning) and then there's Pam who heads the Centre of Teaching Excellence for whom I'm doing this research project. OK, so Jane is notionally my line manager but it really isn't that simple. I suspect that many readers will be in similar situations. Finally, the vast majority of management development and business programmes assume Free Market Economics as the basis for business behaviour. Do we really want to promote that? Is teaching it one of the ways we create the myth that 'markets' really exist and "that's just the way it is"?
So the question comes, how can we help people at work who want to do their job better or want to do a different job? Well that's the basis of my research. I've been working with managers and professionals in a coaching or mentoring type way for about 8 years now and I've noticed that there are three areas that affect how they can improve what they do.
They Play with New Ideas
If we want to improve the way we work then it's probably not going to help that much if we just try harder - we've been doing that for ages and it really doesn't work. So if we want to improve, then we're going to have to look for new ideas about how to do our work. And once we've found some new ideas we're going to have to evaluate their worth to our work context and then test if they're making any difference when we put them into practice.
So, in my project I'm going to be exploring ways of engaging with new ideas; how we find them, how we relate them to our work and how we reject or choose the ideas we'll try out in our work.
They inquire constantly
into what's going on and whether their actions are making a difference. We need to ask questions about what our work context is like and what difference new actions are making. And we need to be thoughtful about how we ask those questions. There are loads of 'research methods' out there that can be very helpful.
So, in my project I'll be exploring which inquiry methods are useful and doable (not many of us have time to do a full survey before the next meeting!). I'll be exploring with some colleagues how we can make serious inquiry a part of our daily lives.
They attend to moment-by-moment relations
This has been one of the big emphases of managers who have worked with me in projects. They have found that noticing, or more deliberately attending to, how relations create futures makes a difference to their effectiveness. Central to this has been a realisation by those managers that relations are negotiated. I'm afraid that the Jean-Luc Picard (Star Trek) school of management "Make it so" just doesn't work. Our instructions, guidance and suggestions contribute to what others do but don't complete it.
So, I'm going to be exploring how we can act in a ways that notice what's happening in moment-by-moment relations, notice ways of acting that give more space rather than less to colleagues and look for ways that we influence, but also are influenced, towards improved performance.
******
well that's the project, loads of questions to ponder. As much as confidences allow, I'll post about what I'm learning over the next few months.
Comments