The Tuff Blog

It’s always a challenge to capture what’s happening while it’s still unfolding.

Our focus remains, as always, on leadership, organisational development, and exploring new ways of working. While we may be biased in how we see things, it’s clear that trends around new ways of working are becoming more mainstream. More and more traditional organisations are now openly discussing the need to transform their cultures and rethink how their leaders lead.

This is the hardest blog to write because we, at Tuff, are fully and painfully aware of our failings – an awareness that brings humility and self-doubt sometimes. And yet we also know what we offer has a power and we have a duty to share and talk about it so others can consider it. So I will try to outline why, even though there is no such thing as a silver bullet or perfect solution, we think our leadership programme is the last training you will ever need.

The word ‘performance’ carries a lot of thoughts and feelings in the world of work - rarely any positive ones. It’s used simultaneously to describe a company's overall performance and the individual contributions of its employees. Unsurprisingly, many companies try to create a straight-line link between the individual's work (amount, quality, and direction) and the company's performance (value generation, growth, and profitability). But this originates from a ‘just-a-cog-in-the-machine’ view of people, which we think is overly simplistic and outdated. 

Right now the ‘back to work’ tips are everywhere on LinkedIn. The undertone is: how can we protect the poor employees so they don’t stress themselves to death? There is talk that managers should book micro-breaks for their employees so in case they forget. To let them mix remote working and working from the office in the beginning. Why? So they can slowly get used to an unreasonably stressful working climate. As a manager, you are encouraged to apply an arsenal of weapons against stress management. Here’s how I interpret this.

Recently I coached a leadership team and the manager asked me: “What one piece of advice would you give us for when we meet with our teams?”

Psychological safety is something everyone is talking about. But how do you actually make it happen in your team or organisation?

It isn’t anything new to say that ‘business is all about people’ or ‘organisations are the employees’. It’s maybe a bit more challenging to say that almost no one looks after their relationships at work the way they should.

Leadership has been a core concern in organisational strategies pretty much since business began. More recently we have come to name ‘leadership’ as something separate, not just about business success but about creating success through or with people. But just as with any positive, progressive development there is often a ‘shadow’ that comes along for the ride.

There is a shift happening in the social impact sector. Organisations are starting to move from centralised, to decentralised; recognising that legacy bureaucracies are taking precious resources away from the causes and individuals that need them.

Over the past decade, we’ve trained thousands of professionals in how to give adult-adult feedback, and researched the pros and cons of feedback-giving at work.

Three approaches to exploring new ways of working

As well as working with companies and social enterprises around the world, Tuff also trains teachers in our methods and ways of being. When we first started, we were surprised by how strong the hierarchical dynamic was between teachers and even fairly adult students. 

At a recent virtual afterwork hangout, my colleague Lotta told me about an interesting conversation she had overheard between two of her friends who work at different care units. They were discussing how the covid-19 pandemic had forced their departments to reinvent how they were run.

Two examples of new pay models from betterplace lab and Decathlon Belgium

There is a lot happening today in the world around leadership and how we work together in our organizations. New progressive ways of working are being explored more and more, and we continue to wrestle with what leadership is, and should be, going forward. Many would say that we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift, where we, on a large scale, are moving from more traditional hierarchical top-down ways of working to less hierarchical more bottom-up self-directed or self-managed ways.

We had an online meeting last week where we were supposed to talk about what we needed to do to take our projects forward. There were seven of us in the meeting and, as usual, we started by checking in as well as saying something specific about what the purpose of the meeting should be. The atmosphere was rather cheerful, maybe because we all had a need to have some fun, to be a little silly with each other for once.

Why listening is an ability we all need to practise if we want more self-managing teams

More and more is being written about self-managing and decentralised ways of working, with organisations like Haier and Buurtzorg capturing the attention of management and business thinkers the world over. However, most (if not all) of the focus in these case studies tends to be on structures and processes. Don’t get me wrong, structures and processes are extremely important. But they are not enough if we truly want our organisations to shift.

Edwin Jansen is Head of Marketing at Fitzii which is a hiring platform for small and medium businesses based in Canada. Every February for the last four years, Fitzii has celebrated what they call “Valenteal’s Day”, as it marks the anniversary of when they decided to become a teal, self-managing organisation.

It’s no secret that the way we’re working isn’t working. Even the most dyed in the wool organisations are acknowledging that they need to adapt and transition from, as author Chuck Blakeman puts it, the Industrial Age to the Participation Age.

Lately I have been thinking about trainings off-site (classroom) versus development on the job (cf. 70-20-10).  An old metaphor that might be useful is that companies and organisations are exploring so many new ways of working, for example open-plan office spaces (for better collaboration), Agile teams, lean and all the way to self-management.

Most leaders today accept that in order to thrive in a world of complexity, we need to develop ways of working that are less hierarchical and more responsive and agile.

An introduction to Liberating Structures and how to use them in your organisation or group.