Schlagwort: NewWork

Allgemein, Board, Digital Transformation

NewWork: Deconstruction of the safety net

Intro

In the past I have already dealt several times with the topic “NewWork”. My focus here is on how new ideas and concepts can be established in organizational structures. Phrases like “always focusing on customer benefit” are not very helpful if you are established in a company with several 1,000 employees.

Decisions without safety net

Both in projects and in middle management it is becoming increasingly evident that decisions are not only made, but also that a lot of capacity is “burned” in the justification of a decision. This culture of justification (the “backups” in the slide sets) may seem helpful to the project managers and division managers. But they only help the decision maker in case he has really made the wrong decision. And then other mechanisms are needed, not the questioning of the original decision making.

This discipline is due to the organisational structure. The project and division managers have been conditioned over years to act in this way. And so the justification system was optimized over a long period of time.

The dismantling of this culture must take place across all hierarchies: Every form of approaching new working structures must have a stable size: Trust. Without this, it is not possible. In the vast majority of cases, employees at all levels are in a position to make their own decisions in their field of work. A manager or project manager should be able to assess this area. If a wrong decision is made, everyone should work together on the solution and not on the search for the cause. With this one can then go new ways, be it only partially (in projects / in the area) or also generally. Executives and project managers who cannot deal with this are a problem that can only be solved by top management.

The safety nets must be dismantled across all hierarchical levels. This includes senior management as well as other levels such as division managers and project managers. Trust must once again become the centre of work in an organisation. Without trust, we remain in the old models.

Disclaimer: In this article I refer to having to justify everything exactly in advance. I do not question the sense of a functioning risk management system. I still believe that a functioning risk management system is not only sensible, but also vital for survival.

German version here.

London Big Ben House of Parlament
Allgemein, Board

Agile Micromanagement

Intro

Today I wanted to deal with my (admittedly empirically not relevant) experience about new leadership styles. Especially with young executives I increasingly experience that the style is more authoritarian, but agility and NewWork tries to shape the external image. This is the pendant of pseudo agile for Management styles.

Agile micromanagement?

What is striking? Individual elements from the agile environment are taken up and consciously communicated to the outside world. However, central conditions are not fulfilled. The most important of these is trust.

For NewWork it is not enough to include

😘

in the work instructions

When dealing with new working conditions, it is not enough to just set up a table football table or to use the new “Duzen” [german] to pretend a closeness that is not lived.
Newwork for me (I unfortunately don’t know a central definition) means, among other things, creating new freedom for employees. There are still goals for this, but it is no longer checked on a step-by-step basis what the status is like. The boss (manager…) is there to avoid problems. Conversely, this also means that employees have confidence in their manager.


Newwork also means checking process steps for meaningfulness. Especially in large corporations, measurements and excelsheets have established themselves where nobody knows what they are good for anymore. A manager who has understood this actively questions whether everything always has to be right. A pointless work instruction remains pointless, even if you garnished the mail with “…… that would be totally sweet” during forwarden.

Every organization gets the leadership it deserves

Let’s come back to the entry mentioned “Agile Micromanagement”. In many cases, managers are conditioned in this way: On the one hand, there is the expectation that managers, especially from middle management, are always meaningful. But this is where the will to change lies with top management: this trust must be lived from the highest hierarchies.


The middle management reacts with the hybrid model quasi out of self-defense: On the one hand micromanagement is expected, on the other hand one wants to be agile. Often, by the way, the same management encourages this through some kind of innovation. I would be careful to point out the senselessness as an evangelist: As a rule, you can’t change organizational structures from one day to the next.


Agile methods and NewWork require New Management: The executive as mentor and coach in mutual agreement with the employees. And the epicentre is trust, which can and must only be lived from above. And this can only be exemplified slowly by top management. Top managers have just been deprived of empathic traits and what do we do with toxic executives?

Digital Transformation, Leadership

New Book: Newwork

Recently I received the book “NewWork“. The book is by Christiane Brandes-Visbeck and Susanne Thielecke. Recently, I wrote a contribution to Generation Y that was very well received: On the one hand, there was a lot of criticism, but also a lot of approval from people like me who have had a similar experience with the changes. Time to deal more intensively with the topic of New Work. At the weekend I finally had time to do so. A short statement:

I have the feeling that the book is written exactly for me as a target group:

New forms of work are described without claiming to be feasible in any form of organization. Topics such as CoWorking, Design Sprints or Business Modell You are introduced more objectively. The reader is not shown that the different forms are a “must have” for everyone.

What critical people quickly notice is that different scenarios would not be feasible. I think that for many companies I know, this would also be true for the current management. The authors Christiane and Susanne make no secret of the fact that support from senior management would be indispensable for the introduction of new models and new Work Settings in a modern Business World. But they go one step further: examples by Thomas Sattelberger (Telekom) or Fabian Kienbaum (Kienbaum) illustrate how a transformation process is implemented in practice. I personally found these sections even more exciting than the sober presentation of the various techniques. Not only agile and/or aspects of the modern toolset (“Design Thinking”) are considered, but also well-known tools such as “Home Office” are put to the test and their modern integration into everyday work is presented. This tools are even known, but not in  best practice in every company used.

The myth “work-life-balance” is cleared up: work is a part of life and no balance has to be created, but it has to be integrated in a way that is compatible for all participants. Classic career paths are broken down: Not every career today is as linear and plannable as it was 30 years ago.

The book is in German, has 224 pages, published in the Redline and here buyable. The book is great for all people, who are interested to learn something new.

 

New Work