Robert Paterson's Weblog

Human Organization - Trust and Dr Jonathan Shay

Here is a Washington Post Interview with Dr Shay - He not only makes sense for the military but I think for all organizations.

Modern Soldiers From Ancient Texts
Physician Advising Army on Personnel Policy Takes Lessons From Homer

By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A25    

What do the works of the Greek poet Homer have to do with the nitty-gritty details of personnel policy in today's U.S. Army?

Plenty, says Jonathan Shay. In fact, so much that the former assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, who has written two well-received books examining Homer as a chronicler of military men in "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," signed on this month as an adviser to the Army's personnel chief. Shay's task is far from literary. Rather, it is to help boost "cohesion" -- that is, the essential psychological glue that holds soldiers together -- in Army units.

It is a long way from ancient Troy to today's Pentagon. But Shay sees a direct line.

In his first book, "Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character," he used Homer's account of combat in the Trojan War to examine the Vietnam War, and especially how poor leadership increased the trauma of many U.S. soldiers in that conflict. Shay's sequel, "Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming," reinterpreted Odysseus's troubled voyage back to Ithaca as a way of understanding the long and painful journey home of many combat veterans.

Through his work as counselor of Vietnam veterans, Shay has become a passionate advocate of the three things that he has concluded reduce the trauma of war on soldiers: keeping members of units together, giving them good leadership, and putting them through intense and realistic training.

"Cohesion, leadership and training -- each of these is a protective factor against psychological injury," he said. And together, "the synergism is enormous."

So, he said, he sees his one-year stint at the Pentagon as a work of "preventive psychiatry."

Signing on with the Army at age 62 may seem to be an odd career move for someone who is a veteran not of the armed forces but of three different Ivy League universities. Indeed, everything about Shay's background paints him as an unlikely candidate to advise the military: a beard-adorned, yoga-practicing resident of Newton, Mass., who describes himself as a "lifelong liberal Democrat, and proud of it."

But, he explains, 17 years of counseling Vietnam veterans at what is now the Department of Veterans Affairs transformed him from being a detached academic into a zealot for cohesion in U.S. military units.

"I am a physician with a fire in the belly for prevention of psychological injury in military service," Shay wrote in a summary of his work. "As such I am the missionary for the injured veterans whom I serve in the VA. They don't want other young kids to be wrecked the way they were wrecked." Indeed, to not abandon his patients, he is staying with the VA part time during his Pentagon tour.

His goal of cohesion is easily explained but harder to achieve, he said.

" 'Cohesion' is really about mutual trust," he said. "If you don't have mutual trust, you tend to burn up all your physical and emotional resources." For example, a soldier in the front lines who distrusts his comrades' ability to protect him from the enemy will not be able to sleep well. "If your gaze is directed inward -- 'Can I trust these guys?' -- then your cognitive resources are directed inward, when they should be directed outward, toward the enemy," Shay said.

The notion extends beyond small units such as squads and platoons. When subordinate commanders trust and understand their superiors, entire large divisions and corps become more militarily effective, he argued.

"Trust lubricates the friction of warfare," he said. "If every move in the chain of command has to be formally laid out, you are going to move slowly, and the enemy is going to move faster than you."

Another oddity of his move to the Pentagon is that it comes essentially after he and his allies in personnel policy have won much of the argument, especially on unit stabilization. After decades of transferring people every couple of years, the Army earlier this year reversed course and is trying to keep soldiers attached to the same unit for much of their careers.

Shay cautiously applauds the Army's recent shift, saying it goes in the right direction. But, Shay said he is not sure how far the service has moved or how permanent the changes will be.

"Changing the culture of a large institution is a very protracted process," Shay cautioned.

He said he sees some worrisome signs in the U.S. military in Iraq. The abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, he said, directly resulted from the failure of leadership at the small unit level.

"What you need is a crusty, old sergeant who says at the right moment, 'We're soldiers; we don't do that [expletive],' " Shay said.

An Army report released in March found widespread problems with unit cohesion in Iraq. Its authors recommended that the Army do a better job of getting mental health resources to the troops.

Shay appears to disagree with that view.

"Honestly, I don't think the most important thing to do is to provide mental health professionals," he said. Rather, he returned to his three core issues: "The most important thing to do is to provide cohesion, leadership and training."

Overall, he said he is less worried about the mental health of regular, active-duty soldiers serving in Iraq than he is about the part-time troops in the National Guard and Reserves, and even more the thousands of private security personnel working on contract there.

Unlike service personnel, he noted, contractors have no formal network of support to help them when they return home, even if they are hired as bodyguards or placed in other combat-type roles.

"The amount of potential dynamite we are sowing in our own society by sending people into that situation, that way -- it just terrifies me," Shay said.

What do his friends and neighbors back in the liberal suburbs of Boston think of him helping the top brass make the Army more militarily effective?

"They know that I'm not just trying to turn people into more effective killers," Shay said. "The point of fighting in a just cause is to win, not to kill. The highest form of military skill is to win without killing."

What is more, he said, it also has to do with the morality of our own society. "If we're sending people to fight in our name," Shay said, "we damn well better be sure to win swiftly, and not kill any more of the enemy than is necessary."

   

    © 2004 The Washington Post Company

Banks - The Limits of the Efficiency Model - Class Action Suit by Star Teller

A star teller with many years of experience and in the lead role at main branch is the initiator of a class action suit against CIBC for unpaid overtime.

What is really going on? Is it really a matter of pay or is there a deeper issue? I think that it is a sign that CIBC and the banks are reaching the limits of running banks like a machine and that it is now time to think about how by looking at the model of a truly "Human Work Place" they could heal this wound and also get the performance that they desire

TORONTO (CP) - In what's being called a potentially precedent-setting case in Canada, a bank teller has taken on one of the country's biggest financial institutions with a class-action lawsuit that alleges CIBC fails to pay overtime to its customer service staff.

Dara Fresco said Tuesday that she's owed some $50,000 for the two-and-a-half to 15 hours a week of additional work she says she's been required to perform as a teller and personal banker since 1998.

The 34-year-old Toronto woman, who has worked at more than a dozen CIBC branches, points out that's a lot more than her current annual salary of $30,715.

I've been working for the bank for almost 10 years and I figured enough is enough already. I wanted to get paid for the overtime," Fresco said at a news conference Tuesday, just hours after the lawsuit was filed in Ontario Superior Court.

The $600-million class-action suit is expected to cover an estimated 10,000 current and former non-management, non-unionized CIBC employees across Canada, many of whom are women.

"What is unfair is that my colleagues and I are rarely being paid for the overtime that we are working, and that's just not right," Fresco alleged.

"I decided to seek out legal advice to see, mainly, if this was allowed and to find out what my options were ... because it isn't fair to work and not be paid for your time."

I don't think that this issue is really about pay. I worked for CIBC for many years and for the last 5 was SVP for HR. This issue is about managerial culture and the relationship between the staff and the bank's  senior leadership

In the decades that I was at Wood Gundy and then at CIBC, we knew that sales were key but we knew that the key to sales was relationship. But in the last 10 years only one thing now counts - sales. Everyone now has a set of targets, ever expanding, that they have to make. CIBC retail has become a machine. The client is there to be farmed. The business, the clients and the staff have all become commodities.

As CIBC has become a machine, the people who feel the most alienated are paradoxically the stars. Every milestone passed leads to another hurdle. Life just becomes a treadmill.  Key staff feel like Sisyphus, who as a curse was forced by the Greek Gods to roll a boulder up a hill - every day. Their reward for achievement - another boulder. The claim is that they get paid for success - but the amounts are paltry compared to investment bankers.

They feel unappreciated. They feel that they are treated like things. They feel that no one cares about the clients either. They are not people anymore they are leads or they have yield. It's all about the numbers.

I come to my point - in medical malpractice - the key to being sued is not the malpractice but the nature of the relationship.

Many malpractice suits are brought not because of mal-practice nor even because of complaints about the quality of medical care but as an expression of anger about some aspect of patient-doctor relationships and communications.

The theory presented is that under the stress of anxiety and physical illness, some patients regress to childhood needs; physicians are not generally trained to fill such needs. Thus, these patients, angry because of this, express their anger in malpractice suits. This theory has been taught to physicians and medical students as part of a physician continuing medical education (CME) seminar on Loss Prevention/Risk Management through demonstration of active-listening techniques to seminar participants.

Physicians who understand and can respond appropriately to the emotional needs of their patients are less likely to be sued. This may also translate into a more fulfilled practice of medicine by those physicians who are most aware of the importance of a positive relationship. (My emphasis)

My advice to my old place CIBC is to look beyond the obvious and look to your culture.

There is more performance and less friction available in a more human model. I will write more about this in the next few days. I will be using examples from a very tough organization - the US Marine Corps!

reboot9 - What would a human & high performing organization be like? Part 1

The theme for reboot9 this year is "Human".

Please help me as I fool around with some of my ideas. I speak better when I have had a chance to sketch out my thoughts so if you don't mind, I am going to play around with some of the ideas here.

I am going to talk about what would a human organization be like that really performed well.  What would a human organization be like if it was truly Natural? I think that if there was a real natural model it would be always replicable and it would not depend on magic. It would have a basis in math as do all relationships in nature. Ants, Lions, Oak trees, Suns do not need vision and charismatic leadership to organize to their optimal potential. Nor should people - nor did we. But I get ahead of myself......

When we think of organizations - we tend to think of them as ones that look like this.

They are neat and tidy. They are like a "well oiled machine".

They have parts, or departments, that have specific roles that have to be coordinated and directed by great leaders.

We think that high performing organizations have "Great Leaders" - all our management books talk about this requirement. All the millions of organizations hope to find a great leader. Great leadership is seen as the holy grail. If you get a great leader - you will win. Pity there are so few of them around. Sad to have a model that depends on such a scarce resource.

We think that high performing organizations are efficient. To be efficient, great organizations have to know know what they are doing and where they are going. So the key to a great organization is to have a Strategy based on an appreciation of the overall context. Then they develop a clear and focused mission. They have as little redundancy as possible. The best organizations are highly aligned to the goal of the mission. So in the current model all depends on knowing what is going on and how best to act. Oh if only the world could slow down and be more predictable again like it was say in the 1950's.

In the best organizations today, middle management is frowned on as an idea. It is the current whiz to talk about decentralizing power direct to the workers. Teams and individuals are seen as the panacea. But after the great leader tries this for a while - he often finds that little gets done and gets frustrated. They tend to centralize again. Not a lot of fun for those inside. So what is the model then - decentralized or centralized?

I could go on. The bottom line is that we think that organizations are machines.

Machines with brilliant leaders who can see the world with clarity and who know best where to go and how to get there. The shame is that the people in them are so difficult to deal with. But it's the only model we have and if we tried hard enough we surely will make it work. If we got a leader like Alexander the Great we would be fine.

I think that all of this is false. Everybody believes it to be true but then everybody believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that it was flat too.

This idea of how an organization should work is a dogma.

A dogma that is reinforced by the gatekeepers of the orthodoxy - the new church of business schools and consultants who punish heretics - just as the Church shut up Galileo.

My intention is to refute utterly this dogma about what an organization is. I intend to show you, as Galileo was able to show those who could choose to see, that if you get enough perspective, you can see beyond the immediate and the obvious to what is really there in nature.

Galileo used a telescope to show the moons of Jupiter. This is what he showed people.

This is his working paper where he showed the new reality. That moons swung around Jupiter and had a relationship with Earth that proved that Earth also orbited the sun.

He used a telescope as a tool to get sufficient perspective to make this observation.

I have been struggling and fussing to find my moons of Jupiter. My self imposed goal to find an observable, replicable, math based, emergent and hence natural and hence human model for a high performing organization that would knock the dogma organization for six.

I think I have found it!

Instead of a telescope, I have used time to get enough perspective to see what what was hidden from us.

I have been disciplined in seeking my "Moons". What I found meets the conditions of Science.

As I recall, Science has to be observable, repeatable and hence it has to have a coherent mathematical underpinning. A Natural, and hence Human Organization, must share the principles of all organizations in Nature.

In Nature, organizations do not need brilliant top down leadership. They need only good initial conditions. Good natural organizations will naturally tend to excellence. They don't need a vision or a strategy. They need to have an inherent ability to react appropriately to changing conditions. They do not drive dysfunction or ill health, they do the opposite. Healthy natural organizations increase the overall well being of all their members. Their purpose is to allow the group to reach its optimal potential.

The organization that I have found through the telescope of time - has all these properties - does yours?

In addition to these principles, unlike Dogma, everything that is truly based in Nature has relationships that are mathematically consistent and replicable in all cases. Light or gravity are not variables that shift depending on scientific whims. The organization that I have found is based on the Magic Numbers of how humans relate best to each other. What are the mathematical truths about your organization?

In Nature, the best designs evolve until they reach an optimum.

The organization that I have found had a 400 year development period and then settled into the ideal, after  massive crisis, for a 400 year period of excellence. How long since your last reorg?

The power of the design of the organization that I have found is so great that it has left a 2,000 year design legacy in modern organizations that have to deliver extreme performance today.

Later today I will open up my kimono and tell you more.

Marketing in the Human Workplace

How does a Human Workplace Market? (Via Mark Ramsey)

I have described the Tribal Business Model in my series on Trusted Space here. Starbucks is one of the examples used.

Now here is an outstanding piece on how Starbucks breaks all the old rules and sets all the new ones by John Moore (Not Johnnie Moore) of Brand Autopsy fame. It all about delivering an ever better experience rather than spending money on talking about what you might get. It's all about wants versus needs. It's all about your people and how disciplined you are in every detail of the experience for both employees and customers. It's not about growth for growth not is it about brand for brand - it's all about delivering the real stuff.

This Manifesto will soon be a book Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture (Hardcover) - go here for the website that will talk more about the Book.