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
1
An 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