Healing Organisation Principle #1 | Take the truth

“The truth will set you free” (John 8:32)

For years, from my mid-teens and through my early twenties, I told myself that I didn’t have a problem with alcohol. I always got up for work in the morning. All my friends drank. What was the issue? Then two events happened within months.

I was volunteering, doing telephone outreach for a self-development organisation. I showed up one evening for work and one of the supervisors told me that I was too hungover to be “present” with people on the phone. He sent me home and told me not to come back again unless I was clear-headed. I was stunned. Some supervisor was telling the “great management consultant” Richard Atherton that he wasn’t up to volunteering for some pokey self-help group. This was the first time in my drinking career that I had been told that my drinking was affecting my performance.

A few months later, another breach of my defences: a volunteer in the same organisation told me that not all alcoholics were alike. “Not all alcoholics pour gin on their cornflakes for breakfast,” he told me. There was such a thing as a “binge alcoholic”. He shared the story of a guy who lived on a houseboat. He never drank during the day, got drunk most nights of the week and slowly saw his life get smaller and smaller. I could buy “binge alcoholic”; I could see I was like that guy on the houseboat. Within months of hearing that story, I had fully accepted that I had problem. I vacillated for about another year, but ultimately I quit drink for good.

In both of the interventions I describe above, these individuals were giving me honest feedback. In the first case I was being told that drinking was affecting my performance. In the second, somebody was helping me to identify with who I really was, a certain type of alcoholic. In both cases, they helped me to break my denial.

Denial keeps us comfortable. Denial allows to survive. But denial also stops us growing. It keeps us from acknowledging that we’re injured and that we must give ourselves the time to heal.

Leaders-managers in The Healing Organisation adopt mechanisms to help people break denial at many levels.

Individual

At an individual level, breaking denial requires adopting practices that encourage us to be emotionally honest with ourselves. This could be journaling, it could be regular sessions with counsellors, coaches or therapists. It could be a safe, honest relationship with a mentor at work. The point is to have some place to get some feedback and challenge about the detail of our experience and how we feel about that reality.

Tough questions, uncovering emotions and unpalatable truths. Of course there are a myriad of techniques and practices to help people to excavate the truth of their experience.

Team

At a team level, the members must commit to create regular opportunities to get real with themselves about their reality. The team must have data. This could be productivity, wellbeing, quality of output, financial contribution, customer experiences — whatever is most pertinent. But data alone is of no use. Sophisticated deniers can dismiss and explain away data. Team members must have the courage and the capacity to have an open dialogue about that data. Leader-managers must encourage strong cultural norms that encourage the data gathering, dissemination and open dialogue. It goes beyond transparency. Transparency is at its core, but it’s having the fora where it’s safe to process the data that matters most.

To take an example practice, a low-tech technique for sense making and denial breaking at a team level is the “Lean Coffee” approach. A Lean Coffee session is an open forum for anybody to show up and discuss a particular issue. As opposed to more stage-managed meeting styles, the agenda for the session is created democratically at the start of the meeting according the concerns and interests of those present.

At a small scale, this style of meeting offers a great opportunity to break management denial by exposing them to the real views of staff in an environment where staff free raise issues that matter to them. Further, management and and staff are encouraged to engage in real dialogue about the issues raised, with the potential to break denial on both sides.

Organisational

At the organisational level, we often have financial and operational data, but lack richer data reflecting human patterns may be lacking.

Companies specialising in so-called ‘sense making’ offer mass, realtime ethnographic research of an entire staff population of ‘human sensors’. This approach offers the opportunity to capture emotional and cultural data at scale. This may provide compelling evidence of company concerns beyond what can be achieved from anecdotes gleaned through smaller-scale meetings, or through the filtered data served up through the existing bureaucracy.

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In summary, leader-managers in Healing Organisations make space for robust data gathering, dissemination and reflection at an individual, team and organisational level.

For the entire series on the Healing Organisation, start here.