The Performance Improvement Blog

Learning and Performance Improvement in 2013

The Internet Time Alliance principals have made predictions for 2013. Charles Jennings offers this picture for the year:

A confluence of technology and improved connectivity, increasing pressures for rapid solutions and better customer service, and demands for higher performance, will force the hands of many HRDs and CLOs to refocus from models of ‘extended formal training’ to place technology-enabled, workplace-focused and leader-led development approaches at the core of their provision.

Clark Quinn predicts that “…we’ll see more examples of the notion of a ‘performance ecosystem’ of resources aligned around individual needs and responsibilities, instead of organized around the providing silos.” While he expects greater use of mobile devices to support individual needs and responsibilities, he thinks many organizations will fail to use these methods effectively.

Harold Jarche reminds us that “…work is learning and learning is the work in the network era…” However, he also believes that most organizations will continue to deliver formal courses and instructor-led training programs.

Jane Hart says that no matter what IT and T&D departments continue to do, individuals and teams will find ways to bypass these units and use technology to access what they need when they need it.

Jay Cross, similar to Jarche, argues that because of the speed and complexity of change, “Learning will continue to converge with work. Increasingly, workers will learn their jobs by doing their jobs.” He believes that “smart companies” will recognize the need for a management style that supports this kind of learning.

This group of thought-leaders seems to envision a world that is making strides away from classroom-based, formal learning and towards informal, social, mobile learning. My prediction is that 2013 will be a time of sorting out instructional delivery methods, with mobile devices taking center stage. But I don’t think there will be much overall gain in support of learning. The economic and legal pressures on organizations, perceived and imagined, will prevent most from adapting to the technological, social, and demographic changes that are going on around them.

To make learners accountable for their own learning, to push down responsibility for learning to customer-facing employees and project teams, and to engage workers in continuous performance improvement, means admitting that the way managers have been doing things might not be best for employees and it means giving up centralized control. This is difficult stuff for CEOs and other managers to accept.

So, while I hope the ITA prognosticators are right (Full disclosure: I have co-founded a business to support individual, team, whole organization, and community learning.), I’m afraid that 2013 is not going to be a year of substantive change in our organizations. Executives will talk a good game, and may even look like they are adapting to the new reality, but when faced with a choice most will opt for the familiar and safe path. 

Managing to Outcomes in Nonprofit Sector

This is the traditional time to reflect on trends observed during the past year. One major trend I have observed is performance management of nonprofit organizations. Actually, this is an accelerating trend that got its impetus from Peter Drucker decades ago. Nonprofits are becoming more and more focused on what McKinsey & Company calls “managing to outcomes”.  

I know, you thought all organizations managed to outcomes. Not so, particularly in the social sector. Nonprofits have been more like manage-to-what-makes-you-feel-good or manage-to-spend-the-money. It has been less about results and more about the process of doing the work and providing services. Now a shift is occurring towards greater recognition of the importance of measuring outcomes and using that information for learning. That is, learning how to be a more effective organization and how to increase impact of programs and services.

If your organization is involved in philanthropic activity, if you serve on the board of a nonprofit organization (or NGO), or if you work for a nonprofit or a philanthropic foundation, or if you donate to nonprofits, then you should pay special attention to this trend. It will affect what you do and how your money is spent.

This intensified focus on outcomes and learning is a result of a confluence of factors in the growing and increasingly important U.S. nonprofit sector (According to the Foundation Center, “In 2010, nonprofits contributed $804.8 billion to the gross domestic product (GDP); this equates to 5.5 percent of GDP… the nonprofit sector employed 13.7 million people.”). The factors that are contributing to the change include:

• Increasing demand for services for the poor, the disadvantaged, the elderly, and the marginalized
• Less public money for social programs (Mario Morino calls this the “Age of Scarcity”.)
• More people, and a wider spectrum of people, interested in “doing good”
• Greater demand by social investors for evidence of impact
• Greater demand from policy-makers for evidence of impact
• More leaders on nonprofit and foundation boards who want to see results
• Increasing professionalization of the sector (e.g., MBAs leading large nonprofits)

So the need for services is growing while resources are dwindling and, at the same time, funders and boards of directors want more accountability and more impact from their investment. Because of all of these factors, there is pressure on the sector to develop more efficient and effective organizations. These are organizations that embrace a culture of measurement and performance improvement. Mary Winkler of the Urban Institute emphasized this point when she said:

…organizational culture and a predisposition to measurement and managing toward results is perhaps the single most important ingredient to success. A culture of continuous improvement needs to be evidenced at the top. Equally important, however, is the extent to which the culture of continuous improvement is integrated at every level of the organization. 

That means having leaders who are willing to learn from what they do and apply that learning to improving organizations, as well as their programs and services. This is not an easy transition for many of these leaders who have been accountable for only process and output in the past. They will need the support of funders, staff, constituents, consultants, and the public at large, to make this change.

Learning to be Great Organizations

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of democratizing organizational learning. I argued that organizations need to be continuously learning for the purpose of improving performance and achieving business goals. And in another post I wrote that for this to happen, organizational leaders need tools. That is, they need methods for learning from the organization and for learning how to learn from the organization. I wrote, “If we are going to democratize learning in organizations, we need to teach everyone how to learn and how to use tools to discover useful information. We need to make learning tools accessible to all employees when and where they need them.”

Developers of organizational learning tools, whether they be faculty, internal leaders, or free agents, have very few outlets for getting those tools to the people who need them in a fast and cost-effective way. Major publishing houses take too long, cost too much, and have limited distribution channels. Penelope Trunk addresses this problem in her blog post, “From PR to profits: the problems with publishing.” One could challenge her motivation for writing the piece, but her criticism of traditional book publishing, from my experience, is accurate.

Many tools, such as employee surveys, graphical representations of models, or steps to solving organizational problems, do not require a book. These tools could be made available in shorter forms and without all the trappings of a best seller. However, simply posting materials on the author’s Web site is not the answer either.

Another avenue for distribution is professional associations. These guilds develop and sell their own materials as a major source of revenue. They often work with a select cadre of member-authors and the products can be quite pricey. The American Evaluation Association is an exception to this with their AEA365 blog, a vehicle for any member to post an article and links to related resources. It is intended to be a free exchange of information and tools among members. The Employee Engagement Network is another example of a place to share information about tools for improving performance, specifically by increasing employee engagement. Although both sites serve an important purpose, neither is designed for authors to publish tools or for managers to find what they need when they need it.

It is wonderful that many free resources are available within professional communities. However, an alternative is needed where creators of organizational improvement tools can distribute those tools quickly and easily to any leader when and where those tools are needed.  And to make high quality tools available, creators must be compensated, even in a small way, for their expertise and effort. This is the space that my business partners and I hope to fill with Learning2BGreat.com.  Anyone who has created materials that can be used for organizational improvement may sell their wares from the site. The author decides what it is worth and sets the price. Anyone who needs a tool to help them help their organization may purchase and download the appropriate tool from the site. The tools are organized in topics and linked to information about the authors. L2BG is a virtual marketplace for connecting professional resources with the people who need them, on-demand. This ecommerce site is an experiment that we hope will continue to grow and have a profound effect on improving organizations of all types. 

What Gets Measured Gets Done...Revisited

One of the most frequently visited posts on this blog is “What Gets Measured Gets Done…or Not.” I suspect that the post is interesting to readers because of the popular axiom, not because of the content of the post. In that post I argue that measurement is not enough. An organization has to do
something with those metrics in order to “get done” what needs to get done, i.e., organizational learning, performance improvement, and change. The act of measuring things like sales, customer service, product quality, teamwork, employee engagement, or learning, does not necessarily mean that anything will be done differently.

A better way to talk about measurement in organizations is the way Terry Starbucker writes about it in his blog post titled, The Truth About “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It”, a variation of the first axiom. He writes:

The thing is, I am a proud member of the “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it“ school of business.

It’s not one of those total absolutes, but I’ll say this – it’s pretty darned close.

So when I would hear “proof” that was anecdotal, or based on “feel”, or hearsay, or seven degrees of separation indirectness, I usually don’t buy it.

Terry goes on to describe performance improvement and cost savings he achieved in a former company because he had measures of employee behavior and customer satisfaction and he and others used those numbers to develop solutions for improving performance. He not only had the data but he did something with it.

Of course, many activities are managed without being measured. Many managers organize work, provide direction, and supervise people without measuring anything important. Are they managed well? That’s a different question.

And that leads us to another variation of the first axiom: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” I like this wording because it ties measurement to action. I have done many program and organizational evaluation studies for managers who asked me to measure processes, outcomes, and impact… but didn’t want to use the data to change. I suspect the explanation for their behavior is threefold: 1) they were hoping for a glowing report that would make them look good to their bosses and funders; 2) if they didn’t get a glowing report and findings implied the need for significant change in programs and staff, they could always find something about the measurement method that would discredit the findings; and 3) they could be accountable for measuring something without having to be accountable for improving performance.

The organizations that embrace performance improvement are those that make a concerted effort to understand what the metrics mean to their organizations and how they can use the findings to make decisions about what should be sustained and what should be modified. By all means, measure everything that is important to the success of your organization. But only do this if you are going to use the data to guide decisions about improvement.

Culture and Creativity

Workplace culture is the "what", "why", and "how" of organization. It is what work is being done and what resources the organization has to do that work, why that work is being done and how those reasons are communicated to employees, and how people work together and make decisions. Meghan Biro, in a blog post for Forbes titled "Your Employees Are Engaged...REALLY?", makes a distinction between the "what" and "why" of workplace culture. While I agree that employee engagement is heightened when employees know why things are done the way they are done (for example, work environment, benefits, promotions), managers must also pay attention to how things are done. Dov Seidman explains this concept in his book, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything. He says, for example, in a self-governance culture: 

People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

Examples of "how" are offered in Marla Gottschalk's blog post How to Develop a More Creative Workplace. She gives some excellent suggestions for how managers can promote creativity. For example, she recommends giving employees a notebook for recording their thoughts and ideas about customers, products, and processes. By doing the things she suggests and making the time and space for these activities, management is communicating the message that they value everyone and need everyone's input in order to be a successful organization. This is powerful. In addition to collecting creative ideas for new products, improving customer service, and solving problems, it is likely that employees will feel more valued and be more motivated to work hard and do their best in that culture. Soon the expectation is set and nurtured that this is a company in which everyone works hard and does their best. 

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a software development company that has aligned its culture with its business goals. They have found that to produce creative, useful solutions for their customers, they need to support a particular kind of work environment. They describe that culture in this way:

The Menlo Way^TM is defined by JOY through the following practices:

• pairing; no one works alone
• High-Tech Anthropology^R
• open and collaborative workspace
• high speed voice technology^TM
• daily stand up
• 40 hour work weeks
• pets and babies at work
• making mistakes faster
• doing the simplest thing that could possibly work
• origami project management
• work authorization boards; storycards, yarn, and stickers
• estimation without fear
• integrated quality advocacy
• test-driven development

Clearly, how people work together and support each other is considered to be essential to the success of Menlo. They value collaboration and creativity and nurture a culture that communicates these values. 

In an interview that Dave Summers did with fomer Corning Glass exec Lina Echeverría, she is quoted as saying:

I was reading a website that was talking about the different rules for innovation. Many people have said "You should do this, you should do that, you should expect, you should choose from, you should know how to select", but if you do not have the culture that believes that innovation is everybody's role...not only that..that innovation is accessible to everybody. If you do not have that culture that says "I am also creative and I'm empowered to use that creativity as part of the overall goals of the organization, then you don't have much.

Processes can be wonderful, but they are not the real driver. The real driver is that culture that says "Let's make it happen!"

This is why I think culture is so important to an engaged, creative workforce. How you do your work says volumes about what leaders value. It's not "pets and babies at work" or jelly beans on every desk or shuffleboard in the employee lounge. What matters is the message that the culture communicates to employees. When done right, employees feel like management cares what they think and that what they do matters to the success of the company.

Why Evaluate Executive Coaching

Executive coaching has quickly become a nearly two billion dollar industry. Many companies now rely on coaching for the development of their leaders. Having a coach, once perceived as an admission of failure, is now perceived as a normal part of managing large, complex organizations. And coaching has also become common for entrepreneurs who need help transitioning from leader of a start-up to manager of a rapidly growing company.

With this acceptance of coaching, CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in it is paying off.  Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies of coaching tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.

For example, an American Management Association survey of coaching found that respondents from organizations that use coaching more than in the past are also more likely to report two kinds of advantages:

1. They’re more likely to report that their organizations have higher levels of success in the area of coaching.

2. They’re more likely to say that their organizations are performing well in the market, as determined by self-reports in the combined areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

The problem with this kind of study of coaching is that it is correlational and correlation does not necessarily mean causation. It is highly likely that high performing organizations choose to use coaching more than low performing organizations. In other words, high performance predicts coaching rather than coaching predicts high performance.

Survey studies of coaching are problematic in other ways, too. One, they lump all coaching into a black box without examining the many variations of coaching. Two, they are based on the assumption that the purpose of coaching is to change the individual when, in many cases, the purpose is to change a team or the organization as a whole. Three, they don’t tell us exactly how the coaching contributed to performance improvement within an environment in which many other factors may have contributed to the change. And four, they rarely look at long term impact, which is what is often the intended purpose of coaching.

To evaluate executive coaching, first we need to define what is meant by "coaching" in the situation being evaluated. Do they mean coaching for greater self-awareness, for developing leadership skills, for making a transition to a new job or role, or for solving a specific problem? Do they mean face-to-face, by phone, or email? Do they mean an hour a day, an hour a week, an hour a month, or as needed. Is the coaching process mostly inquiry or mostly advocacy?  Does the coaching include interviews of supervisors and direct reports? Does it involve observation of work situations and interactions? In other words, what does coaching mean for that executive and that organization?

What we need are studies that tell us what kind of coaching under what circumstances contribute to what kind of results for the organization and over what period of time. Surveys are helpful for knowing the extent of coaching and the general attitude of employees toward coaching. But to understand coaching well enough to be able to replicate effective coaching or improve coaching for an organization, we need to tell the story of the coaching experience. How did the executive get involved in coaching? What were her expectations? How did she work with the coach? What did the coach actually do? How much time did they spend in coaching? What happened? What did the executive learn? What is the executive doing differently? What impact is that having on her team and organization? What evidence is there that this kind of change is occurring and that it is linked to coaching?

When we can answer these questions we will understand what it is about various coaching interventions that have an effect on results.  We will be able to compare coaching to other potential interventions and replicate effective methods. We will know the return on investment. We will know what makes an executive coach qualified to coach. We will know what makes one approach to executive coaching better than another.

Evaluation of coaching is also important to do because it reinforces client learning. When we ask someone questions about what they have learned, it helps to make that learning stick. This is what happens when we ask clients questions about the coaching they received. Their self -awareness is increased, behavior change is strengthened, and long-term follow-through is more likely.

Executive coaching: How do we know it works?

Executive coaching has quickly become a nearly two billion dollar industry. Many companies now rely on coaching for the development of their leaders. Having a coach, once perceived as an admission of failure, is now perceived as a normal part of managing large, complex organizations. And coaching has also become common for entrepreneurs who need help transitioning from a leader of a start-up to a leader of a second and third-stage company.

With this acceptance of coaching, as with any performance improvement intervention, CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in it is paying off.  However, we don’t know any more about the impact of coaching then we did in 2008 when I wrote the blog post, “Coaching for Results.” Studies of coaching tend to be surveys of people being coached. Sometimes they include direct reports and supervisors to find out if anyone observes attitude or behavior change in that executive.

The problems with these kinds of studies are fourfold: first, they lump all coaching into a black box without examining the many variations of coaching; second, they assume that the purpose of coaching is to change the individual when, in many cases, the purpose is to change the organization; third, they don’t tell us exactly how the coaching contributed to performance improvement given an environment in which many other factors could have contributed to the change; and fourth, they rarely look at long term impact, which is what is often the intended purpose of coaching.

Researchers Erik de Haan and Christiane Niess write in Training Journal:

Coaching is an organisational intervention. The client is part of the organisation. He brings with him deep traces from the organisation. And if anything changes, he will act differently upon the organisation, where more people will be affected.

So if one is interested in the impact of executive coaching, one would have to measure its effects at the organisational level. This has only been done to a very limited extent. Three hundred and sixty degree assessments by others in the organization about the client have been used in the past to measure effectiveness of executive coaching. However, in those cases, feedback from bosses, peers and direct reports was used essentially to measure the impact of executive coaching on the client, not on others in the organisation. As far as we could determine, organisational feedback on the impact of executive coaching on organisations in a wider sense, has not been investigated or analysed.

Coaching can take many forms so that when someone says they are being coached, that doesn’t tell us very much about their coaching. Do they mean coaching for greater self-awareness, for developing leadership skills, for making a transition to a new job or role, or for solving a specific problem? Do they mean face-to-face, by phone, or email? Do they mean an hour a day, an hour a week, an hour a month, or as needed. Is the coaching process mostly inquiry or mostly advocacy?  Does the coaching include interviews of supervisors and direct reports? Does it involve observation of work situations and interactions? What does coaching mean for that executive and that organization?

What we need are studies that tell us what kind of coaching under what circumstances contribute to what kind of results for the organization and over what period of time. Surveys are helpful for knowing the extent of coaching and the general attitude of employees toward coaching. To understand coaching well enough to be able to replicate successful coaching or improve coaching for an organization, we need to tell the story of the coaching experience. How did the executive get involved in coaching? What were her expectations? How did she work with the coach? What did the coach actually do? How much time did they spend in coaching? What happened? What did the executive learn? What is the executive doing differently? What impact is that having on her team and organization? What evidence is there that this kind of change is occurring and that it is linked to coaching?

When we can answer these questions we will understand what it is about various coaching interventions that has an effect on results.  We will be able to compare coaching to other potential interventions and replicate effective methods.

 

Sports and Business Are Not Analogous

As the 2012 London Olympics goes into its final weekend, I feel compelled to write about sports and leadership. For the past few weeks it seems like all we’ve heard from the news media are analogies between sports and business. These are stories about perseverance, commitment, being single focused, working hard, and, of course, a desire to win. All admirable traits but it’s very different having these traits as an athlete and having them as a leader in an organization.  

We do love our sports, whether player or spectator. Billions of people around the world watch the Olympics every four years. They express exaltation in winning and pain in loss. The usual explanation for this enthursiasm is loyalty to team and country, as well as admiration for the athletes. I think it’s more than that.

Sports give us the respect, control, and membership that we don’t get from our work organizations and life in general. With sports the rules are simple, the goals are clear, what we have to do to reach those goals is known to all, feedback is immediate, and there is a beginning and an end to the competition. With sports we feel a sense of belonging (membership) to something bigger than ourselves, win or lose. How else can you explain Chicago Cubs fans?

Our work lives are chaotic, unpredictable, and filled with disappointments. We know that we have little influence over many aspects of what happens to us day to day. We have no simple way of keeping score or knowing how well we’re doing. Feedback on our performance is rare. There is no beginning, middle, and end, it just keeps going.

As human beings, we need more than this. We need respect, control, and membership. Those qualities are not readily available in our organizations, so we turn to playing and participating in sports. We play and watch sports, not because they are analogous to our organizational lives, but because they are so different.  

David Waltz alerts us to this false analogy. He cites five ways in which the Olympics (and sports in general) do not teach us about business. He writes:

1. In business, winners and losers are not easy to determine.
2. In business, more than one person or team or organization can win.
3. In business, not every “player” is the best at what they do.
4. In business, the work never ends; there is no time to stop, rest, and rejuvenate.
5. In business, there are no permanent successes (Gold Medal); success is fleeting and “champions” can become has-beens overnight.

I love sports. I love competing and I enjoy watching my favorite sports. But I don’t think I learn much about leading an organization from this pastime. That’s okay. What I get instead is an experience that I can’t get from my business or my work consulting in organizations. I get a feeling of respect (from others and from self), a sense of control over events (real or imagined), and a belief that I belong to something bigger than myself (real or imagined). 

 

How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations

Several excellent blog posts have recently come to my attention that, when combined, provide a how-to for creating a learning culture in organizations. One of these posts appears in Jane Hart’s blog, Learning in the Social Workplace. In this post, she writes that workplace learning is:

1. Structured learning experiences (e.g., training) and informal learning experiences (e.g., communities of practice)
2. Helping workers learn continuously on the job
3. Peer-to-peer learning that is “lite on content and rich in interaction”
4. An integral part of everything that is done in the organization, supported by technology and social networks
5. Managed by learning professionals who facilitate both formal and informal learning experiences

Hart writes further that learning professionals should, therefore, take on a new role, that of “Enterprise Learning Community Managers.” I see this role a little differently. I think we need this role but learning professionals should teach all managers how to serve in this capacity. A learning culture needs every manager encouraging, facilitating, and holding people accountable for learning.

In another post titled, How to create sustainable behaviour change, Tom Quayle writes “learning and development needs to move away from the fixation that the way to grow the capability of your staff and improve performance is through training.” He explains that training doesn’t change long-term behavior. Employees must be motivated to change. This is done by managers communicating a compelling reason for the change, measuring the new behavior and giving feedback to employees, creating “triggers” in the work environment that remind employees what needs to be done, and building communities of employees that support shared learning.

Quayle offers some specific ideas for sustaining learning and change, such as:

Do your homework on your employees. If they're sales people and they're out on the road, how can you bring development directly to them? Is there an app or social networking forum you can communicate through? And what type of individuals are they? Are they likely to respond to emails or do they prefer face to face interactions?

In this suggestion, he is imploring managers to adapt the method of learning that they use to how particular individuals and networks learn best given the content. Use the ways they tend to communicate when conveying information to them.

In a blog carnival started by Enterprise Collaborative, Harold Jarche contributed a post titled, The learning organization: an often described, but seldom observed phenomenon. In this post, he writes that we need to:

move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time. Learning must be an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function.

Jarche observes that learning organizations have these three characteristics:

• People at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment
• The daily routine supports social learning
• Time is made available for reflection and sharing stories

What I think Jarche is saying and what I think is missing in most discussions of organizational learning, is an organizational routine of feedback, reflection, and active social learning. That is, organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

 

Harry Levinson 1922-2012

For many managers, motivation and manipulation mean one and the same thing; but employees know the difference. –Harry Levinson

We lost one of the giants in the study of organizational learning and performance this week. Harry Levinson died at the age of 90 after a long and productive career making organizational leaders aware of the importance of psychological dynamics to their employees and themselves. Every leader and manager should take heed of Levinson's thought-provoking theories and practice.

Levinson made us aware of the psychological contract between employer and employee. This is the implicit understanding of what is expected and how they will act toward one another. Acting contrary to this contract causes a great deal of stress for both and can be detrimental to the working relationship and productivity of employees.

Levinson was one of the first to speak about the impact of organizational culture on worker performance. In his article for Organizational & Social Dynamics titled “Organizational Immersion and Diagnosis: The Work of Harry Levinson”, Michael A. Diamond writes:

For Levinson, the informal and affectionate bonds between workers and their foremen (supervisors) helped to explain effective, physically safe and emotional[ly] healthy, management performance in the workplace. The study [of Kansas Power and Light Company] also pre-dated much of the popular enthusiasm several decades later with organizational culture.

Regarding Levinson’s notions about performance review, Diamond writes:

…he emphasized the human compassion inherent in and necessary for providing subordinates with unambiguous, direct, and honest feedback in performance evaluation.

Regarding Levinson’s thoughts about mentoring, Diamond writes:

Executives and their management must become better mentors, he argued, and to do so they must become more knowledgeable about what motivates their employees.

Levinson had some strong words for organizational consultants. He believed that they should do assessments (diagnosis) before recommending interventions. He didn’t seem to have much patience for consultants who are ready with a solution prior to fully understanding the problem. This belief became the cornerstone of Levinson’s advice to consultants and clients. In an interview that Diamond conducted with the consultant’s consultant, Levinson is quoted as saying:  

Clients and consultants prefer the `quick fix' approach to organizations. This approach assumes the consultant somehow magically knows what the client and client system require without organizational assessment and diagnosis. Moreover, it is this impatience and short sightedness that has led to the acceleration and popularity of more prescriptive approaches that promise more than they can possibly deliver. These approaches include executive coaching as practiced by many non-psychoanalytic consultants. Furthermore, these practices tend to focus on a part of or member of the system rather than the system as a whole and that contradicts the spirit of organizational diagnosis. One can imagine how this sort of orientation would leave consultants vulnerable to counterproductive collusions with the executive client…

Levinson blamed the psychological dynamics of leaders, more than business and economic factors, for the failure of large companies. In an article for the journal, American Psychologist, titled: “Why the behemoths fell: Psychological roots of corporate failure”, Levinson writes:

The failure of many American corporations to adapt to changed economic circumstances has become a major social concern. Many reasons have been alleged for those catastrophes. These allegations describe the ostensible reasons, but they do not explain adequately. The explanations are fundamentally psychological, significantly having to do with individual and organizational narcissism, unconscious recapitulation of family dynamics in the organization, exacerbating dependency, psychologically illogical organization structure and compensation schemes, inadequate management of change, and inability to recognize and manage cognitive complexity. To deal more effectively with such problems calls for greater psychological sophistication among boards of directors and senior executives.

That article was published in 1994. I wonder what Levinson would say today about captains of industry who are leading companies that are “too big to fail”. What would he say about the demise of some giant financial services companies over the past few years?

Much of what Levinson theorized and applied in his consulting has now become mainstream thinking among organizational psychologists and consultants. However, at the same time, much work still needs to be done to create psychologically safe cultures for employees and employers.