The Healing Organisation Principle #4 | Ask for help
“Sometimes, asking for help is the most meaningful example of self-reliance” — Unknown
As we discussed in ‘Principle 2: Embrace Pain’, humans build elaborate defences to not see and to not process their pain. In most cases, people would rather abide a slow demise of chronic suffering, than to feel the potentially healing power of acute pain. It’s equivalent to people choosing to die a slow death from gangrene than to feel the harsh pain of an amputation that might ultimately save them. For organisations this tolerance for enduring suffering may mean leaders failing to:
- Kill dying products
- Fire underperforming staff or teams
- Exit low yielding territories
- Improve and eliminate dumb processes
So, how to snap out of the suffering and get into meaningful action? One way is to ask for help. People outside of your immediate situation can hold your hand, or give you the kick you need to face the pain that you must feel to get to the other side.
The concept of the in-house performance coach-cum-therapist is exemplified by the Wendy Rhoades character in the show Billions. Wendy stages regular powerful, often deeply personal interventions with the people within the fictional Axe Capital. I believe this type of role will become increasingly common in organisations as leader-managers recognise the value of people being helped at a deep level. They recognise that helping to engage in deep personal work gives them access to them having a bigger impact in the workplace.
Let’s speculate on the Blockbuster corporate failure as an example of how this type of help may have helped. I’m claiming that the management didn’t need to bring in outsiders to show them charts of industry video rental hire projections; they needed people to help them experience the future. They needed people to come and have them experience the joy and convenience of streaming videos from the comfort of their own homes; the unimaginable range of potential titles that a streaming service might provide them. They didn’t need to see how screwed they were; they needed to feel it. And they needed someone to hold them as they processed their grief and rejuvenated for new action.
We could be seeing a similar scenario now playing out with the emerging decentralised ‘cryptonetworks’. These scalable, open ecosystems, provide rich opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation. These networks may eventually out-compete the existing, dominant centralised technology platforms. There may come a time soon when the leader-managers in these big platform organisations may need to grieve the ‘death’ of their business models. This is so they can reset themselves emotionally to explore the new opportunities presented by ‘cryptospace’.
A model for change
Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross created a model for grief that was adapted as a means to describe the change process by David Schneider and Charles Goldwasser.
Figure 1: Kubler-Ross Change Curve, adapted by David Schneider and Charles Goldwasser
There is some evidence, at least in one study, that the changes that people experience during organisational change mirror that of personal loss. As a model, I believe that it is instructive. It gives us an indication of some of the emotions that some of us feel when we experience business change. External help can be one of the most effective ways to help people process the changes and emerge stronger.
“Outside” might mean external consultants or coaches. It also might mean members of arm’s-length internal consulting, coaching or mentoring teams. They key point is that they are empowered to act in a healing capacity.
For the entire series on the Healing Organisation, start here.
