Need to run session for managers as part of a MDP.
Common problem seems they inherit cynical team of well established staff with 5-10 year service who cannot overcome past problems and focus on future.
Need to give advice on how managers can intervene back in teams so that team members drop their baggage and move on and deal with current and future problems.
Context - Public sector organisation, unionised, industrial relations reasonable but staff slow to embrace change.
Matthew Foulsham
2 Responses
Cynical teams
Matthew I’m not sure if anyone has developed what you need yet, but there are a number of ideas that arise out of individual therapy techniques that may have some use if they were adapted. The writers of a book called “Change” Watlawick Weakland and Fisch suggest you can change behavour in two ways. one is with new information, the other is by pushing someone into their behaviour. An example of the second would be a manager starting a meeting and asking for all the bad news that people want to tell him about the company and this latest initiative, but insist that no good news is to creep in. This can serve two purposes, once you are encouraged to give bad news with an insistence on no good news, you start to console yourself that maybe it isn’t quite so bad. Secondly by complying, you are no longer doing what you want to do, but you are doing what you have been asked. But you have been asked to do what you were doing anyway, which poses a dilemma for you and presents a new puzzle which at least isn’t the same as the same old one and maay lead to a different progression of events. These sort of interventions also sytart taking some of the pressure off the manager to be solely responsible for new directions and maintaining morale and start to share it around a bit where it appropriately should be
Change House method
One company I previously worked for had a very effective workshop called ‘Change House’. It was used to help individuals identify their attitudes to change, and the content made them place themselves in virtual rooms such as the ‘Denial Room’. It was always successful with managers by raising self awareness, and might help general employees. I assume we’d acquired this method from somewhere in the market, but sorry that I can’t offer anything more concrete.