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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: J-B Warren Bennis Series
- Sprache: Englisch
In The Art of Waking People Up authors Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith draw on more than thirty years of practical experience with hundreds of organizations-- from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies, schools, and nonprofits-- to reveal new ways of giving and receiving feedback that maximize personal and organizational change and foster lifelong learning. They show how organizations can develop the systems, processes, techniques, and relationships that affirm, rather than undermine, the intelligence and humanity of their employees. This important resource is filled with the necessary tools, interventions, and strategies managers can use to encourage their employees to speak, hear, absorb, and use the information they need to improve the way they work.
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Seitenzahl: 448
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Preface
Why We Wrote This Book
How the Book Is Structured
Acknowledgments
The Authors
Part I Context
1 An Orientation to Awareness and Authenticity
Resistance to Change
The Limitations of Roles and Expectations
Why Organizations Create Roles
Cultivating Awareness
Cultivating Authenticity
Cultivating Congruence
Cultivating Committed Action
What Wakes Us Up
Seven Openings for Waking Up at Work
Organizational Support
Turnaround Feedback, Coaching, Mentoring, and Assessment
Lifelong Learning
2 The Art of Waking Up
Some Underlying Questions
Clarifying the Goals
Turning Ourselves Around
Breaking the Cycle of Distrust
Three Ways of Being
3 Where It All Begins
Options in Responding to Dysfunction
Transcending Family Ruts
Parents as Managers and Managers as Parents
Four Steps to Breaking Patterns from the Past
How to Explore Family Issues at Work
Overcoming Overcompensations
Finally Growing Up
Part II Processes
4 Turnaround Feedback
Varieties of Feedback
Turnaround Quality Feedback
Reasons for Not Communicating Honestly
Feedback Is Risky
Tips About Feedback
Team Feedback
A Script for Managers Seeking Feedback
Video Feedback
Questions to Prompt Self-Reflection
5 Transformational Coaching
Coaching Is a Voluntary Relationship
Coaches Are on the Sidelines
Six Steps to Transformational Coaching
Turnaround Feedback Supports Transformational Coaching
Strategies for Transformational Empowerment
6 Strategic Mentoring
What Is Strategic Mentoring?
The Uses of Mentoring
Mentors as Strategic Partners
What Makes Mentoring Strategic
The Stages of Strategic Mentoring
E-Mentoring
Tools for Successful Mentors
Understanding Organizational Culture
7 Participatory Assessment
Values—Integrating Theory and Practice
The Complexity of Experience: What Are We Assessing?
Cultural Diversity and Assessment
Creating a Context: Linking Learning and Assessment
Designing Participatory Assessment Systems
Six Steps to Participatory Assessment
360-Degree Assessments
Discipline and Termination
Twelve Criteria for Just Cause
Part III Techniques
8 Courageous Listening
The Elements of Communication
How Listening Is Distorted by Organizational Hierarchy
The Elements of Communication
Listening as a Human Being
Active, Empathetic, and Responsive Listening
Listening for What We Do Not Know
The Need for Self-Honesty
Ask Courageous Questions
Attitude and Listening
Listening and the Creation of Community
9 Paradoxical Problem Solving
Learning to Love Our Problems
Breaking the Compulsion to Solve Problems
Appreciating Paradox
Obstacles to Problem Solving
Empowering Curiosity and Imagination
Five Steps to Effective Problem Solving
Multidimensional Problem Solving
10 Supportive Confrontation
Making the Case for Supportive Confrontation
Problems and Opportunities in Confrontation
Criticism Is Critical
How to Prepare for Supportive Confrontation
The Method of Supportive Confrontation
Supportive Confrontation in Teams
Handling Dodges and Evasions
Ways of Encouraging Responsibility
The Varieties of Apology
11 Risky Conflict Resolution
Two Kinds of Organizational Conflict
Responsibility for Conflict
Roles in Conflict Resolution
Preparing for Resolution
Eight Paths to Conflict Resolution
Lessons from Others
The Importance of Attitude
Part IV Relationships
12 Waking Organizations Up
Transforming Cultures, Structures, and Systems
Collaborative, Learning-Oriented, Inquiry-Based Cultures
Synergistic, Team-Based Structures
Integrative, Value-Driven Systems
13 Fostering Congruence and Commitment in Organizations
Control Versus Learning Orientation
Creating Learning Organizations and Relationships
From Training to Development
Organizational Congruence
Consensus Decision Making and Commitment
From Waking Up to Committed Action
14 Ubiquitous Leadership and Organizational Democracy
New Forms of Organizational Leadership
Waking Up and Democracy
Strategic Integration
Cultivating Love at Work
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Cycle of Distrust.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1. 360-Degree Assessment.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1. Traditional Diagram of Communications.
Figure 8.2. Communications and Context.
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1. Core Learning Processes.
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1. Organizational Dimensions.
Figure 14.2. An Integrated Strategy for Waking Organizations Up.
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1. Three Ways of Being.
Chapter 4
Exhibit 4.1. Supporting Team Process.
Exhibit 4.2. Blocking Team Process.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
The Art of Waking People Up
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
The Art of Waking People Up
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
The Authors
Dedication
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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A WARREN BENNIS BOOK
This collection of books is devoted exclusively to new and exemplary contributions to management thought and practice. The books in this series are addressed to thoughtful leaders, executives, and managers of all organizations who are struggling with and committed to responsible change. My hope and goal is to spark new intellectual capital by sharing ideas positioned at an angle to conventional thought—in short, to publish books that disturb the present in the service of a better future.
BOOKS IN THE WARREN BENNIS SIGNATURE SERIES
Branden
Self-Esteem at Work
Mitroff, Denton
A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America
Schein
The Corporate Culture Survival Guide
Sample
The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership
Lawrence, Nohria
Driven
Cloke, Goldsmith
The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy
Glen
Leading Geeks
Cloke, Goldsmith
The Art of Waking People Up
Kenneth ClokeJoan Goldsmith
The Art of Waking People Up
Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity at Work
Copyright © 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-BassA Wiley Imprint989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, e-mail: [email protected].
Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739 or outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax to 317-572-4002.
Jossey-Bass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Credits appear on page 305
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cloke, Ken, date.
The art of waking people up : cultivating awareness and authenticity at work / by Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith.
p. cm.
“A Warren Bennis book.”
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7879-6380-1 (alk. paper)
1. Mentoring in business. 2. Incentives in industry. 3. Organizational behavior.
I. Goldsmith, Joan. II. Title.
HF5385 .C54 2003
658.3'124—dc21
2002015466
FIRST EDITION
HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
BOOKS BY KENNETH CLOKE AND JOAN GOLDSMITH
Thank God It’s Monday: 14 Values We Need to Humanize the Way We Work, Irwin/McGraw Hill, l997
Resolving Conflict at Work: A Complete Guide for Everyone on the Job, Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2000
Resolving Personal and Organizational Conflicts: Stories of Transformation and Forgiveness, Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2000
The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy, Jossey-Bass/Wiley, January 2002
BOOKS BY WARREN BENNIS AND JOAN GOLDSMITH
Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader, Addison Wesley, 1997
BOOKS BY KENNETH CLOKE
Mediating Dangerously: The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution, Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2001
Mediation, Revenge and the Magic of Forgiveness, Center for Dispute Resolution, Santa Monica, California, 1996
To our mothers, Shirley and Miriam, who encouraged us to wake up, be authentic, and express our values through our work.
Foreword
About twenty years ago I wrote an article titled, with the poignance of a flower child, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” What I wonder about today is, Where will the leaders come from? Not too long ago, I did some pro bono consulting for an outstanding research center with a gazillion Nobel laureates on staff. Over the past few years they’ve had a lot of difficulty attracting and then holding on to leadership. The problem seemed simple yet intractable. Anybody who was good enough to pass the rigorous scientific criteria of the search committee didn’t want the job. They wanted to do science. Having served on dozens of search committees for academic deans and presidents, I know the same problem presents itself in many other forums. There is a genuine dearth of people who are accomplished in their disciplines and want to take on leadership and are competent at it. So every other year the aforementioned research institute, after a long, drawn-out process, hired some reluctant soul who, after a year or so, found out he really wanted to go back to his lab, and the search started all over again. Ad nauseam.
Recruiting and sustaining the most talented people possible is the first task of anyone who hopes to create a successful organization and deliver on its promise. The people who can achieve something truly unprecedented have more than enormous talent and intelligence. They have original minds. They see things differently. They can spot the gaps in what we know. They have a knack for discovering interesting, important problems as well as skill in solving them. They want to do the next thing, not the last one. They see connections. Often they have specialized skills, combined with broad interests and multiple frames of reference. They tend to be deep generalists, not narrow specialists. They are not so immersed in one discipline that they can’t see solutions in another. They are problem solvers before they are managers. They can no more stop looking for new relationships and better ways of doing things than they can stop breathing. They have the tenacity that is so important in accomplishing anything of value. And they are aware of what they are doing and bring an authenticity to the process.
Now what’s interesting about all this is that more and more of our workers are, to use Peter Drucker’s thirty-eight-year-old phrase, “knowledge workers.” And today I should add that more and more are “investor workers,” bringing their own profitable ideas into their companies. But where will leaders come from to run these new organizations, lead this emerging workforce, and deliver a viable new economy? What about the social contract between employers and employees, that hallowed implicit contract that usually offered some form of loyalty and responsibility to both parties? Roughly 25 percent of the U.S. workforce has been dumped since 1985 and even at present, when the unemployment rate is low, about 6 percent, you can figure on a half to three-quarters of a million employees in flux every year.
An interesting bit of data is that in 1998, about 750,000 workers were laid off or quit or retired, and of those, 92 percent found jobs that either paid more or were equal to what they had been getting. A recent survey reported in the Wall Street Journal revealed that four out of ten employees were less than three years in their job, only a third of the workforce works in an old-fashioned nine to five job, and the quit rate this year is 14.5 percent. Ten years ago it was about 3 percent. I figure that the chum of the workforce at any given time is between 20 and 25 percent; that is, the number of workers who are temporarily out of work or looking for new opportunities is roughly that figure. So what about the social contract, which in our “Temporary Society,” in our “Free Agency Society,” seems to be: “We’re not interested in employing you for a lifetime. . . . That’s not the way we’re thinking about this. It’s a good opportunity for both of us that is probably finite”? Is it all going to be many finite trips?
In light of this constant flux, organizations going for longevity need to discover continued sources of learning, growth, and revitalization. But how do we reach the next generation? Do we continue to do what we have been doing, with just a little bit more? Why fix what ain’t broken? The discrepancy between the promise of available talent and delivery on their potential raises questions we need to consider. Are we providing learning experiences that will build the cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, and leadership competencies that are required for sustained success in the “new economy”? Is there space in our clogged work lives for the philosophy, the metaphysics, the critical thinking of the enterprise? Are we giving our employees a passion for continual learning, a refined, discerning ear for the moral and ethical consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the purpose of work and human organizations?
It is an intense journey to achieve a positive sense of ourselves and to know our abilities and our limitations. We can get there by understanding what it takes for us to learn about ourselves: learning to solicit and integrate feedback from others, continually keeping ourselves open to new experiences and information, and having the ability to hear our own voice and see our own actions.
Is this a tall order for today’s organizations and their leaders? Not when we examine what’s at stake. As we face revelations of corruption and fraud in our workplaces; as we totter on the brink of economic instability, and swing from disillusion and cynicism to outrage and despair, the times call for us to wake up, call forth integrity, and have the courage to champion the dramatic changes we require.
Cloke and Goldsmith have created a blueprint for organizational revitalization, renewal, and regeneration. The direct, explicit, accessible strategies they prescribe will transform work environments into living, vital learning opportunities that challenge leaders on every level, from CEO’s and middle managers to team members and line workers, to apply their wisdom to the systems, structures, and day-to-day interactions of organizational life and better themselves, their experience of work, and their collaborative endeavors.
November 2002
WARREN BENNISDistinguished Professor ofBusiness AdministrationUniversity of Southern California
Preface
I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensively active and alive. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, “This is the real me.”
William James
Being “deeply and intensely active and alive” is not only, as philosopher William James describes, the best way of defining our characters, it is how we create them. Our characters, along with our attitudes, ideas, emotions, bodies, and spirits, are molded not simply by the events we experience but also by the ways we experience them. As a result, the more awake we are, the more we define and create ourselves as aware and authentic human beings.
Why, then, do millions of employees arrive at work every day and immediately slip into a hypnotic, semicomatose state? Why do they become spectators and passive observers of their own work lives? Why do they show up only in order to receive a paycheck and begin their “real” lives only when work is over? By failing to be deeply and intensely alive, employees lose their passion and love of what they do. They become cautious and frightened of losing jobs they secretly loathe, or do not care about, or have given up on, or barely tolerate. They grumble and complain, yet feel trapped and unable either to improve their working conditions or leave and find better ones. They become miserable and depressed and engage in pointless conflicts, destructive gossip, and petty personal rivalries. They feel put upon, harassed, overworked, and underpaid. As a result, they slowly die somewhere deep inside. Ultimately, they stop caring and simply wait for weekends, holidays, sick leave, retirement, and death.
Why do so many employees become inactive, inauthentic, apathetic, and unclear about who they are at work? Why is it so easy to get lost in passivity, anesthetized surrender, lethargy, cynicism, apathy, and doubt? What in our workplaces induces this hibernation of the soul? Why do so many people remain in this state for most of their working lives? What can be done to wake them up and cultivate their awareness and authenticity at work?
Ask yourself: What percentage of my working life and that of my coworkers is spent being “deeply and intensely active and alive”? What percentage is spent on autopilot, operating in a fog or haze? How often am I fully awake and using all my potential and how often am I sleepwalking or doing only what is minimally required? What percentage of my working day is spent fully in the present and how much is spent recalling the past or fantasizing about the future? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being highest, how committed am I to making a difference? How much of myself do I bring to my work, and how much of me is playing a role or hiding behind a mask? Even if I bring 90 percent of myself to work, what would happen to me, my coworkers, and my work if I were able to bring that extra 10 percent?
If we never face these questions, we may fail to realize that what we produce at work are not simply products and services but the processes, relationships, and social and organizational environments in and by which they are created. Most important, we create ourselvesby the things we do, the ways we do them, the people with whom we do them, the environments in which we do them, and the attitudes we bring to doing them. The best way to become an aware, authentic person is to practice being awake and alive eight hours a day every day at work.
It is therefore a matter of personal and not merely organizational importance that we decide to wake up, choose who we want to be, and practice being that person every moment of every working day. Our characters and personal lives depend on our capacity to be active and alive, aware and authentic, congruent and committed at work. Yet we cannot achieve these personal goals without actively transforming the organizational structures, systems, cultures, processes, and techniques that put people to sleep and turn them into automatons or objects to satisfy corporate or bureaucratic ends.
Waking up is not effortless or risk-free. As we do so, we are compelled to honestly examine our choices, styles, and patterns; elicit tough, painful feedback from others; critically assess our commitments and the results we produce; and actively participate in critiquing and transforming the dysfunctional conditions under which we work. We are invited to grow up, take responsibility for everything and everyone we encounter, increase our skills, and deepen the honesty and empathy of our communications and relationships with others. We are asked to be fully present in every moment, including the painful, disappointing ones we would prefer not to experience.
If waking up is risky, arduous, and time consuming, why bother? Waking up allows us to reconnect our passion and values with our work. We are able to contribute more to others and create something larger than ourselves. We can learn, stretch, grow, and transform failures into successes. We can develop strategies for improving or transforming our work environments and making our organizations more collaborative and democratic. Most important, waking up allows us to define and create ourselves as active and alive human beings.
Why We Wrote This Book
This book is a wake-up call to transform our working lives. It is an invitation to become conscious of who we are and what we are doing so we can all be more aware, authentic, congruent, and committed in our work. It is a compilation of ideas and experiences, processes and techniques, stories and examples, theoretical analyses and practical advice. It is a challenge to you the readers to overcome the internal barriers to waking up and transform the external hierarchical, bureaucratic, and autocratic organizational practices that put you to sleep.
Over the last thirty-six years, we have designed and conducted thousands of trainings, facilitations, consultancies, coaching conferences, mediations, interventions, feedback sessions, retreats, change projects, organizational redesign efforts, strategic planning sessions, team building workshops, group meetings, and similar practices. In the process, we have worked with multinational corporate giants, family businesses, entrepreneurial start-ups, government departments, neighborhood schools, social service agencies, nonprofits, political advocacy groups, charitable foundations, and community organizations.
Yet we rarely find organizations, even among the most innovative and enlightened, that actively support all their employees in waking up and transforming the conditions under which they work. We rarely find organizations that routinely provide turnaround feedback; that offer collaborative coaching, strategic mentoring, and participatory performance assessment; that actively encourage courageous listening, paradoxical problem solving, supportive confrontation, and risky conflict resolution; and that consciously design their cultures, structures, and systems to deepen personal and organizational learning.
Waking people up, encouraging their self-actualization, and expanding opportunities for participation in decision making are not only important social values, they are ways of increasing motivation, improving productivity, raising quality, and solidifying customer partnerships. To achieve these goals, organizations are ultimately required to jettison their soporific hierarchical, bureaucratic, and autocratic practices, and create collaborative, team-based, democratic practices in their stead.
While hierarchical organizations require a degree of passivity among lower-ranking employees, democratic organizations demand an active, awake citizenry. To generate this level of participation, we need to redesign organizational processes, techniques, structures, systems, and cultures to encourage awareness and authenticity. It is our belief that organizational democracy is not simply an option for enlightened organizations, it is essential to waking up, to the self-actualization of individual employees and to the continued evolution of our political and social democracy.
We wrote this book as a companion volume to our earlier work, The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy, in which we call for organizational structures, systems, cultures, and processes that are participatory, collaborative, self-managing, and democratic. Our purpose in this book is to assist organizations, employees, teams, managers, and leaders in their efforts to break out of the trance created by working for others rather than for themselves; to develop their capacity for awareness and authenticity; and to renew their active sense of responsibility for jobs they perform but do not own.
We wrote this book to challenge everyone to become more conscious, aware, authentic, and responsible for their work environments. We wrote it to help employees design, build, reinforce, and defend the processes, techniques, cultures, structures, and systems that reward vitality, authenticity, and lifelong learning. We wrote it to advocate and promote the idea of organizational democracy as a substitute for hierarchical, bureaucratic, autocratic management-driven organizations. We wrote it to wake ourselves up, and cultivate awareness and authenticity in our own work lives.
It is difficult for anyone to clearly identify, openly discuss, or actively break the hypnotic grip of hierarchically induced apathy, passivity, cynicism, and despair once they have fallen into it. While observing the way we work is the first step in waking people up, it is also necessary to dismantle the aspects of organizations that put people to sleep, and to redesign their cultures, structures, and systems in ways that stimulate personal awareness, collaborative choice, and social responsibility.
We have all sat and watched as the truth was revealed to us—and refused to listen or understand. We have all denied what we implicitly knew was true because it was too painful or difficult to accept. We have all learned the hard way. It is therefore important to recognize at the beginning that no one can wake anyone up unless they are willing to be awakened, and that no one should be judged or censured for being unable to do so. Therefore, while we can assist people in bringing greater awareness and authenticity into their lives, it is important to do so with kindness and empathy rather than harshness and humiliation, and to act as we would like others to act toward us. Beyond this, we can concentrate on waking ourselves up and not merely speaking but being the truth. By being present and awake ourselves, we make it possible for others to do the same.
How the Book Is Structured
In the chapters that follow, we offer observations, advice, and examples to encourage you, the reader, to learn to recognize and act on what you already know to be true. We offer you assistance in giving and receiving feedback, in coaching and being coached, mentoring and being mentored, assessing performance and having your performance assessed. We offer a variety of techniques to guide you in developing the skills you need to make your work relationships more honest, open, respectful, and effective.
We also analyze the structures, systems, processes, and cultural practices that limit personal and organizational growth. We identify the behaviors that suppress awareness, creativity, and initiative and that fail to pass on the information everyone needs to develop their creativity, flexibility, leadership, and responsiveness. We recommend dozens of practical remedial activities, including strategies for encouraging the development of democratic organizations and waking even the most resistant people up.
Each section in the book stands alone and can be read in whatever order meets your needs. To aid you in your exploration, here is a brief description and outline of each section.
Context: Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity
The section considers the context in which we understand our work experiences, process our encounters, and interact with our colleagues. Our initial stimulus for personal and organizational learning is often simply a recognition that there is something we can still learn that will help us lead more satisfying work lives. Yet our desire to learn requires us to acknowledge our shortcomings and modify our attitudes and behaviors based on the feedback we receive. For this reason, the chapters in this section describe the context in which waking up at work occurs, and the difficulties encountered in shifting people’s attitudes and behaviors. We provide tools to investigate the origins of these difficulties and the dysfunctional patterns we learned in families, schools, and peer groups. We reveal methods for discovering who we really are, and expose the relationship between what appear to be personal issues and organizational design.
Processes: Championing Congruity and Commitment
This section explores ways of transforming traditional organizational processes and using them to encourage people to wake up and cultivate their awareness and authenticity. These processes allow us to bridge the gap between the intention or willingness to change and the organizational efforts needed to support people in doing so. Waking people up through turnaround feedback, coaching, mentoring, and assessment requires the use of skills not usually taught to managers plus a willingness to make waking people up a priority in the allocation of scarce organizational resources and already overcommitted work time.
The processes we recommend for supporting people in waking up include turnaround feedback, transformational coaching, strategic mentoring, and participatory assessment. We also discuss ways computer technology can be used to support these processes, including video feedback, virtual coaching, and e-mentoring.
Techniques: Encouraging Turnaround Experiences
Here, we focus on expanding and improving techniques that are commonly used to support personal change. We describe ways of adapting these methods to waking people up, encouraging them to learn from mistakes and become more responsible at work. We start with preventive measures and progress to increasingly difficult interventions as resistance to change becomes more intractable.
We focus on courageous listening, paradoxical problem solving, supportive confrontation, and risky conflict resolution. Each of these methods is redesigned and expanded to supplement turnaround feedback, transformational coaching, strategic mentoring, and participatory assessment. Each is also a useful skill in building organizational democracy.
Relationships: Sustaining Organizational Awareness and Authenticity
Finally, we consider the cultures, structures, and systems required to build and sustain organizational democracy. Hierarchical, bureaucratic, autocratic organizations put employees to sleep. To wake them up, organizations require collaborative, learning-oriented, inquiry-based cultures; synergistic, team-based structures; and integrative, value-driven systems—all of which must then be strategically integrated into a single democratic whole.
Acknowledgments
In preparing this book, our thinking has been guided by the many clients, students, and colleagues we have known as we have learned how people wake up, turn their lives around, and transform their organizations. We are grateful to each of them not only for helping us discover techniques and the reasons for embracing them, but for the courage they exhibited in being willing to change themselves and the way they work.
We would like to acknowledge all the people who, even in brief encounters, contributed in countless ways to waking us up. We want to thank those who cared enough to give us turnaround feedback, transformational coaching, strategic mentoring, and participatory assessment. Special thanks go to our mentor Warren Bennis and to Sidney Rittenberg, who helped us sharpen our ideas; to Marvin Treiger, our meditation coach; and to Monte Factor, our personal source of turnaround feedback. Our editor Susan Williams helped us conceptualize the book; our indexer Carolyn Thibault made the text more accessible; and our assistants, Solange Raro and Grace Silva, supported us throughout with loyalty and commitment. This book is dedicated to our agent Michael Cohn, who recently died, and believed in us from the beginning.
We invite you to join us now in a process of mutual self-discovery. We encourage you to open yourself to new ideas and take risks you may have avoided. In the end, waking up, receiving honest feedback, and improving our skills, attitudes, and behaviors are essential parts of life and not to be feared. We hope you will take a chance on discovering who you are, be willing to express yourself authentically with colleagues, and change whatever in your organization stands in your way.
We hope you will accept the responsibilities of organizational citizenship by becoming the best person you possibly can be at work and helping others do the same. Only in this way can you make fulfillment, service to others, growth, learning, happiness, and love a part of every working day. These achievements are the best reward we can give ourselves. They are the most valuable form of wealth and the true aim of every kind of work.
Santa Monica, California
KENNETH CLOKE
November 2002
JOAN GOLDSMITH
The Authors
Kenneth Cloke is director of the Center for Dispute Resolution and a mediator, arbitrator, consultant and trainer. Joan Goldsmith is an organizational consultant, coach and educator specializing in leadership development, and organizational change.
Cloke and Goldsmith have drawn on more than thirty years of practical experience in consulting with hundreds of organizations in the United States and internationally, including Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, schools, and nonprofits. They are coauthors of five previous books, including The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy and Resolving Conflicts at Work: A Complete Guide for Everyone on the Job, both published by Jossey-Bass.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valery
Part IContext: Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity
1An Orientation to Awareness and Authenticity
I consider many adults (including myself) are or have been, more or less, in a hypnotic trance, induced in early infancy: we remain in this state until—when we dead awaken . . . we shall find that we have never lived.
R. D. Laing
We have all encountered employees who seem barely awake, who squander their work lives, who blind themselves to what is taking place within and around them, who speak and act inauthentically, who do not care about what they do, how they do it, to whom, or why. Indeed, many of our workplaces seem populated with the living dead, zombies who wrap themselves in a hypnotic trance, as psychiatrist R. D. Laing described, only to find that they have numbed themselves so thoroughly that they are unable to really live.
This indolent, apathetic, somnolent state has countless faces. It can be found in preoccupations with the past and unrealistic expectations for the future; in attitudes of denial, defensiveness, and disregard for the present; in frustration over failed change efforts; in reduced enthusiasm due to hierarchical privilege, bureaucratic indifference, and autocratic contempt; in a variety of mesmerizing relationships, processes, cultures, systems, structures, and attitudes that limit the capacity to perceive and act based not only on what is taking place within and around us and diminish who we are as human beings.
This zombification and atrophication of work life happens incrementally whenever people are punished for being aware and authentic and, as a result, become frustrated, give up, cease caring, and stop trying. It occurs when managers stop telling the truth and lie or keep silent about things that matter. It occurs when feedback is no longer oriented to how employees can succeed but to how they have failed—not just in their work but as human beings. It occurs when performance assessments become judgmental and hierarchical rather than supportive and participatory; when organizations separate honesty from kindness, integrity from advancement, and respect from communication.
Numbing oneself to experience is a natural response to unfulfilled expectations, unprocessed pain, unfinished grieving, unresolved conflict, and repetitive disappointment. When employees experience repeated losses, pain, conflicts, and disappointments, they often withdraw, shut down, or defend themselves from bruised feelings and unhappy thoughts. In doing so, they deaden themselves to experience and to the pain they would otherwise feel if they were fully awake. The extreme forms of this emotional state are catatonia and schizophrenia, but more familiar examples include apathy, distracted behavior, superficiality, equivocation, isolation, substance abuse, recurring illness, stress-related injuries, cynicism, excessive absenteeism, hypersensitivity, and unresolved conflicts.
When employees defend themselves against awareness and authenticity even in small ways, they diminish their capacity for growth, cease being fully alive and slip into a kind of unfulfilling stupor. How, in this state, is it possible for them to learn or change? What could conceivably motivate them to continue developing, sharpening, and expanding their skills? How do they ever overcome their tragedies or learn to celebrate their triumphs? How do they become responsible team members, improve the quality of their work, or risk changing what is not working?
In truth, their only real option in the face of these disabling experiences is to wake up and change their attitude toward what they have experienced. As they wake up, they increase their awareness, become more authentic, discover where their organization is not congruent with its professed values, and commit to improve their work processes, organizations, relationships, communities, and environments—not once or in isolation, but continually and collaboratively with others. This is how they actually transform their work lives.
As people wake up, they become increasingly conscious of the dysfunctional elements in their work environments and relationships and can see what is not working or might work better. They can then abandon the destructive patterns, adversarial attitudes, injured feelings, upsetting memories, and addictive behaviors that keep them mired in the past. They can release unrealistic expectations for the future and attitudes of defensiveness and denial regarding the past. They can take responsibility for what they do and who they are, for their behaviors and the results they produce. They can then assume the arduous task of transforming their personal, organizational, social, political, and economic lives and creating more satisfying, sustainable, and supportive work environments.
Resistance to Change
In spite of these possibilities, or perhaps because of them, it is rare that anyone welcomes opportunities to wake up, gladly seeks ways of stretching beyond what is safe, or enthusiastically embraces fundamental changes. We are often reluctant to push to the edge of our capacities, to experiment or try out new things. Instead, we resist, avoid, rationalize, and bolster our self-deception that things are fine as they are. As poet W. H. Auden poignantly noted:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Many of us resist change even when it is critical to our well-being; when the need to change is presented gently, empathetically, and with the best of intentions; when we understand that it could dramatically improve our lives. Instead, we become self-protective, accusatory, and suspicious and would rather retreat with our false ideas intact than climb “the cross of the moment” and let our comforting illusions die. Why? What are we so frightened of losing?
We may be frightened that change will deprive us of jobs or income, or eliminate our role or source of identity, or undercut our self-confidence, or unsettle a precarious idea about who we are. We may be convinced that we will never be understood or appreciated for who we are. We may distrust our organizational environments so much that we cannot imagine anything ever changing, except by getting worse. We may have unresolved insecurities or doubts from our families of origin that keep us locked in unhappy relationships and feeling doubtful about our capacities. We may simply lack the personal skills or organizational supports we need to risk doing something that could radically change our lives.
In fact, it is not change that we resist, but what change implies. We resist the loss of what is familiar, the uncertainty surrounding anything new, the insecurity about who we are when the things with which we have identified no longer define us. Waking up and cultivating awareness and authenticity reduce this resistance by revealing a deeper identity that is not bound up in the past or future, or in what is constantly changing.
The Limitations of Roles and Expectations
When we become frightened of these aspects of change, we defend ourselves against learning, resist receiving honest feedback, hide behind roles, become inauthentic, cease being fully awake, and grow insensitive to what is happening around and inside us. We fight to preserve what is familiar, thinking we are protecting our power or image. Yet in doing so, we diminish our capacity for honesty and empathy with ourselves and others. Eventually we become stuck and unable to grow. Whatever our role, at a subtle level, power, ego, and resistance to change are increased by identifying personally with it, while honesty, authenticity, and openness to change are diminished.
In truth, these self-defining roles do not exist—nor, at a human level, do organizations, job titles, hierarchies, or status. They are figments of our imaginations—constructs, hypnotic images, mirages, phantoms, fetishes, and hallucinations that distance us from what is real and from each other. Every role is inauthentic, simply because it captures only a part of what we do and largely ignores who we are. Yet we invest these images with the power to control our lives, twisting them gradually into conformity with other people’s expectations and losing our capacity for self-definition.
In Fraud, a novel by Anita Brookner, a woman tells a friend, “Fraud was what was perpetrated on me by the expectations of others. They fashioned me in their own image, according to their needs.” People become inauthentic and fraudulent by hiding the most interesting, human parts of themselves behind masks and roles, revealing only what they hope others will find acceptable. This is a kind of sleep from which anyone can awaken at any time, even after years of accommodation. To do so requires cultivating awareness, authenticity, congruence, and commitment in ourselves, in others, and in organizations.
However we describe ourselves, whatever roles we assume, they do not touch the deepest parts of ourselves. In addition, in all our descriptions, there is an “I” that is describing “Myself.” Yet the one describing is not the same as the one described. If “I” am able to observe and describe “Myself” as though from outside, which one am “I”? Every role or description we use to describe ourselves seems solid, yet beneath it lies a thought, and beneath the thought lies a thinker. Waking up means discovering the thinker. As we do so, we accept responsibility for our choices and recognize that our power lies there, rather than in our roles and self-definitions.
Why Organizations Create Roles
Traditional organizations use roles to define and reinforce rigid hierarchies of power. They do little to support people in changing or acting in ways that are authentic, honest, immediate, collaborative, and democratic, because to do so would invite a rearrangement of power relationships. Hierarchical, bureaucratic, and authoritarian organizational models permit—and in some cases actively encourage—role rigidity and hypocrisy. These organizations are unwilling to admit or examine their faults publicly. They discourage honest communication, suppress creativity, and undermine teamwork and self-confidence. In the process they put people to sleep.
In the absence of honest feedback and continuous scrutiny, these organizations desperately seek to defend and perpetuate themselves, causing them to undermine the values they publicly proclaim. They espouse creativity yet reward bureaucracy, conservatism, and defensiveness. They urge risk taking but celebrate only those who increase or preserve their financial bottom line. They call for change yet reward caution, stasis, and denial. They advocate equality but radically limit the possibilities for personal and organizational growth for those at the bottom. Is it any wonder that people fall asleep rather than wake up and risk their livelihood championing values that, while publicly proclaimed, are privately punished?
Where are the great examples of hierarchical organizations exercising courageous moral leadership? Where are the profound apologies, the honest confessions, the open admissions of error? When did a corporate CEO or government official last publicly admit wrongdoing without being forced to do so by an angry citizenry, a judge, or a prying press? How often are corporations balanced and truthful in their advertising, politicians in discussing the merits of opposing candidates, or CEOs in responding to allegations of financial or social wrongdoing? Examples of these dishonesties can be found in the newspapers every day and are apparent to everyone who is willing to acknowledge that abuses inevitably flow from the inflexibility and concentration of organizational power. If we want people to wake up and be honest with themselves, we need to honestly reveal what stands in their way within organizational life, act to overcome it, and model the behaviors we publicly advocate, starting with ourselves.
Every day, employees are punished for giving or receiving honest feedback to those higher in rank than themselves. Or their criticisms are passed through a maze of bureaucratic filters and rationalizations that diminish their effectiveness. As a result, many learn the virtues of silence and go to sleep.
Yet organizations that resist honest feedback or penalize employees for delivering it limit their own capacity to adapt, learn, and evolve. They reduce the desire of employees to expand their motivation, increase their skills, and make important contributions to their organizations. They shortchange themselves and those who rely on them.
Employees are then forced to choose among upsetting, ultimately ineffective strategies and to decide whether to fight back, quit, avoid, or accommodate and do what they are told. Few recognize that there is another choice: they can cultivate awareness and authenticity in themselves and others and work strategically to build respect for these qualities within their organizations.
Cultivating Awareness
Everything we do is mediated through our minds, which are immensely powerful, richly complex mechanisms that feed us massive amounts of information regarding our environment and internal activities, all in the service of surviving and succeeding. Our socially constructed minds, however, have the curious capacity to interfere with themselves, to deny disagreeable information, defend against new ideas, consider themselves unworthy, alter facts out of fear, anger, or shame, and confuse the message with the messenger.
Our minds organize our experiences into two primary categories: those that induce pleasure so we want to repeat them, and those that induce pain so we want to avoid them. We use language to focus attention and point our awareness, often with great precision, in the direction of things, ideas, feelings, and experiences that induce pleasure. Yet the thing that points is not the same as the thing it points at. For centuries, Buddhists have distinguished the finger pointing at the moon from the moon itself. Ridiculously simple as this sounds, many of the problems we face at work originate in a fundamental confusion between the observer and the observed.
In receiving critical feedback, for example, we often confuse the finger pointing at us with the person pointing it, and as a result, minimize, justify, or deny the behavior they are trying to call to our attention. We dismiss them by castigating their methods or intentions. We resist their efforts to communicate, and become unable to observe ourselves, evaluate the information they offer, or improve our skills. Human beings are not the only animals that give each other feedback, but we may be the only ones who judge, devalue, insult, berate, humiliate, self-aggrandize, and lie to each other about who we are. We defend ourselves to such an extent that we fail to recognize our true selves. At the same time, our success and survival sensitively depend on our ability to be aware and authentic, to discover what is taking place around and inside us, and to learn from the feedback we receive from others.
Ultimately, waking up means self-examination—not as narcissism, but as though it were feedback from an outside observer. It means looking at what keeps us from looking, listening to the reasons we are unable to listen, and becoming aware of the distortions we create in our own awareness. As we become more awake, we are able to spend more time in the present, reduce our preoccupation with the past and the future, and magnify our ability to recognize, accept, and learn from our mistakes.
Often, when we perform some routine task such as driving on a freeway or engaging in repetitive labor at work, we slip into a reverie and cease being aware of what we are doing. We operate on autopilot. Suddenly, a car swerves in front of us, or a machine breaks down, or the unexpected occurs. Immediately, we wake up, become aware of what we are doing, and tune in to our environment. Yet even then, many of us prefer to remain half-asleep or search for scapegoats, excuses, or places to hide. With awareness, we become better able to face breakdowns, take responsibility for them when they occur, fix them quickly, and avoid long-term damage. Sleepwalking not only dims our ability to foresee and fix breakdowns, it leaves us more vulnerable to harm and less able to recover afterward.
When we protect ourselves from information that could fundamentally alter our ideas about ourselves and the world around us, we defend a fragile status quo and in the process become weaker and more vulnerable. We become unable to move beyond the polished images we hope others have of us—or, strangely, even the tarnished ones we have of ourselves, including the one that we are unworthy or unlovable. We tell stories about who we are and what we could be, do, or have if it were not for other people’s perfidy or for conditions over which we have no control.
In the end, waking up is simply awareness. Awareness is openness to feedback, and feedback is information we can interpret in an infinite variety of ways. We have a choice. We can resist, deny, or defend ourselves against this information, or we can decide to learn from it, adapt, and evolve. We can use it to feel sorry for ourselves, or to castigate others, or to wake up and become stronger. It is up to us to attribute meaning, draw conclusions, and act on the information we receive.
Awareness is available to each of us at every moment. It exists only in the present. It is an intrinsic quality of mind that can move from place to place and increase or decrease in scope and intensity of concentration. It can take the form of a spotlight that identifies shifts in the foreground or a floodlight that emphasizes congruity in the background. Over time, it can be cultivated, exercised, and enhanced, just as it can be neglected, abandoned, and allowed to atrophy.
The first goal of waking up is simply to increase our awareness by maximizing our ability to use internal and external feedback, which consists of information we can use to improve our skills and performance. The second, deeper and more profound goal of waking up is to become more authentic, centered, skillful, and content with who we are as human beings. As Buddhist nun Pema Chodrun writes:
Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It’s going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate. You can leave your marriage, you can quit your job, you can only go where people are going to praise you, you can manipulate your world until you’re blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you. Then those same demons will appear as friendly, warmhearted companions on the path.
