Coherence – Not Just for Teams!

I’ve been writing about Coherence for a long time, without always using the word. A discussion this morning reminded me of the first time the concept was published – in a book on parenting I wrote about 22 years ago.  I was talking about marriage, but it might just as well have been about people who work together. This is what I said:

It is difficult to put into words that which philosophers and poets have always struggled with. Assessing your feelings and expectations can be done through nonverbal means, such as drawing and miming. For instance, one way to look at some different styles of marriage is to symbolize the couple as eggs.

Some couples are like hard-boiled eggs. They’re firm and well done, but they can’t get very close to each other. They may shatter each other’s shell, but even that just brings their outer beings (the white part) together. Their inner selves (the yolks) are isolated from each other. The hard-boiled-egg couples have what’s termed a ‘marriage of convenience.’ No risk; no intimacy.

Other couples are like soft-boiled eggs. One healthy confrontation and they’re a messy puddle, impossible to put back together for a bit more cooking. Very young couples, especially those who have been forced to marry because of untimely pregnancies, are often soft-boiled-egg couples. High-risk; intimacy only when the inner selves are shattered.

Then there are the scrambled eggs. They have even given up their uniqueness to create a single, homogenized entity. They may have a feeling of ‘us against the world,’ but it is a false feeling of security, since neither can function alone. If there are children, they, too, may be expected to become part of the omelet, submerging themselves in the family. Low-risk for the couple; high risk for their children; and a false sense of intimacy.

Successful couples are like fried eggs, sunny-side up. When they are cracked open against the side of the pan, they obligingly plop in, their outer selves attracted to each other, coming together to form a mutual environment for the two yolks. The yolks may move around in their white field, sometimes touching and sometimes moving apart, yet they always retain their individuality. They risk moving against each other with enough force to break one or both, but their mutual base tends to slow down any confrontation. Their intimacy has room for additional little eggs; children are no major threat, since there is space for them to develop as individuals too. Acceptable risk; high probability of intimacy; and personal growth for all.

Now I think I would be more blunt and just describe the hard-boiled as rigid and the soft-boiled and scrambled as diffuse.

This might explain why it bothers me when people confuse Coherence with cohering, especially when speaking about functional teams – the coherent human infrastructure that’s required for successful business.

Listen up!  It’s not about sticking together in one big glob of scrambled eggs.  It’s about being so fully mature and productive that you can bounce off people and not break, and that you can work with them without giving up who you are as a valuable, unique individual.  It’s about being part of the human infrastructure that actually accomplishes something!

The Intern Diaries: Week Seven plus

The realization is dawning that as July ends, the interns will be starting to leave.  Crystal, who’s going to Hong Kong and Macau to visit family, and Lindsay, who’s heading back to Texas, will be the first to go.  And I’m wondering how the others will experience their leaving.

It will be good practice for them, given that they are likely to see their colleagues come and go in their future jobs.  At least this isn’t a downsizing!  Speaking of which, there’s talk of an increase in distressing reactions to being downsized – sabotage, mostly of the technology sort.  Just the sort of behaviors that the non-coherent, short term thinking person is more likely to actually do.

But for our coherent, self aware bunch, I expect their future work life to be more productive and positive.  They understand that temporary setbacks shouldn’t be turned into permanent ones by letting stress overwhelm and alter behavior in a negative direction.  And they act on it.  Even in a down economy, coherent people are naturally attractive to employers.

And now I know that internship has long reaching effects on careers.  Lauren, our Spring intern, just wrote me.  I was concerned that with the job market so poor, she would be locked out, but no, it sounds like she got a job that not only fits her, but which will allow her to help others get a good school fit!

She said:

It is a sales/client services position. First part is I have to call potential students and give them information about Ashford and evaluate them to see if they are a good fit for the school. Once that process is over, I help them enroll and will be their guide through their first course. It should be a challenging but fun position. I just finished my 2 week training course and will start officially on Monday.

Congrats and good luck, Lauren!  They are lucky to have you!  And psssst, just between us, we are about to launch the Role-Based Assessment for careers!

The Intern Diaries: Week Five

Intern evaluation week, or at least according to the email I got.  No one’s come after me for a formal evaluation and that’s a good thing.  I’m pretty bad at meeting people’s expectations for ratings on their various attributes.  To me that’s too much like rating each note in a piece of music.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think we should be rating people on these things:

1. Willingness to dance with your co-workers.  (I don’t mean samba, I mean move with, against, or around them, as appropriate.)
2. Ability to harmonize with your co-workers.  (I don’t mean you have to hit the high notes.  You just need to not be so dissonant that people grimace.)
3. Making music some new way with your co-workers.  (It doesn’t have to be music, literally.  Just something that didn’t exist before.

Ok, I can rate everyone now.   All A’s, intern team!

The Place of Experience in Hiring Decisions

Sometimes someone in a group email discussion says something so well, you have to wonder why they haven’t been blogging about it.  Mark Talaba, blogger at Talabesian-Coordinates had this to contribute on the issue of experience as an indicator in hiring decisions:

“Some people – in the process of acquiring experience – have made lot of other people miserable, and have caused teams to underperform.  Such persons may yet have a ‘history of success’ – but as success can arise from many factors, not the least of which is a team’s ability to perform despite handicaps, even successful exploits are not a reliable indicator.

“One real tragedy of making “experience” a primary indicator in hiring decisions is that, during the past 20 years, there has been such fluidity in the job market that some really bad team players have had the opportunity to turn a series of short-term jobs (which used to be a red flag) into an enticing story of “broad-based experience.”  (A good topic for some investigative reporting!)

“As the concept of Coherent Human Infrastructure takes root, and as organizations come to realize that Coherence and Role are the ‘missing pieces’ of the Quality-of-Hire/Talent Management puzzle, I believe that demand for a pre-hire assessment of ‘teaming characteristics’ will grow exponentially.”

I have to agree.  It’s pretty well known in entrepreneur circles that many of the CEOs who’ve failed in that job a few times are more desirable recruits than the virgins, at least to less Coherent VCs.  In contrast, the interns, collectively, have virtually no experience.  It’s their teaming and their Coherency that make them so amazingly productive.  (Another episode of The Intern Diaries will be here shortly…)

Coherent Conductors, Crabby Culture

The simplest definition of corporate culture I’ve ever seen was “the way we do things around here.”  But corporate culture is anything but simple.  It actually derives from the human infrastructure, the energy of the organization as determined by the predominating Roles and coherency of the people who get the work of the organization done.

So I was particularly interested in Daniel Rubin’s column in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer in which he mentions the predominant newspaper culture as “crabby, but effective.”  This is the setup to compare it to the culture at the US Census Bureau which, while it sounds less crabby, is also likely much less effective.  (If you want to know more, you really want to read the My Two Census blog – nonpartisan and written by presumably crabby political journalists, this is a gem.)

I bet they have a lot of Conductors in print journalism.  Dedicated to getting things ‘right’, using the power of the pen to do the work of the sword and, in general, teaching us the truth as they see it, of course they get crabby at times.  They don’t get nearly the respect they deserve, no matter what type of organization they work in.  But show me a bunch of coherent Conductors, with maybe a coherent Vision Former, a couple of Action Formers and a few Communicators and Curators and you’ve got a team that’s going to follow the Vision and truly give you the news that’s fit to print.

And it will be worth reading.

On Human Infrastructure

Ask Dr. Janice has a new look and a new page.  That’s what happens when there are fresh inputs, both from the environment (feels like Spring at last in Philadelphia!) and the growing human infrastructure in my entrepreneurial life.

I took music instead of art in college (it was a choice in those long ago days) so I figured I was remembering wrong when I thought, form dictates function.  Googled it to educate myself on who said it and what they meant by it, vaguely remembering it had something to do with buildings designed to house manufacturing plants.  It’s actually from this, by American architect Louis Sullivan who coined the phrase in 1896:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function.

I think he meant form should follow function.  Because in the real world, I see much more form dictating function.  That is, we have a form – often in the guise of a policy or procedure or even an architectural structure like a cube farm outside a corner office – that tells us how we should interact.  Consider the hierarchical organization where cross-level discussions are frowned on.  This creates horizontal silos and limits the natural human urge to interact – to function.

For the human infrastructure to be strong there needs to be no limit on thinking, on synergizing, on the production of the fresh and new. It needs to follow Vision.