Coaching in Depth

The Organizational Role Analysis Approach

Susan Long, John Newton, Burkard Sievers, Susan Long, John Newton, Burkard Sievers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855753280
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429912023
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

Coaching In Depth introduces the reader to the management consultancy technique of Organizational Role Analysis (ORA); a technique with the immensely practical purpose of helping managers to stay "in role and on task". The ORA method is grounded in a process of consultation that derives from the conjunction of open systems theory and psychodynamic understandings of human behaviour. It enables the collaborative resolution of the mental and emotional tensions represented in the client's work role as he/she strives to manage the dynamics between their organization-in-the-mind and the organization-in-reality.

PART I
ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE ANALYSIS:
FROM THERE TO HERE

CHAPTER ONE

Organizational Role Analysis: managing strategic change in business settings

Irving Borwick

This quest began forty years ago in my role as a teacher when I was lecturing on English Literature at McGill University. Twenty years later I developed the first systemic programme, the Group Strategy and Action Program® and as part of that development, the Organizational Role Analysis was developed.

The quest

I sought to develop a programme and a process that ensures participants will transform ideas into action. From my earliest days as a teacher I have been confronted with students and managers who avow their undying commitment to new ideas. However, their behaviour belies every syllable they utter. It fascinates me that so many can be committed to so much and do so little about it. My single-minded search has been to bridge what I call the “gap” between idea and action (Figure 1).

Individuals walk away from speeches, programmes, learning experiences of all kinds, dedicated and emotionally committed to a new idea or concept they have learned. Yet, they do not change their behaviour one iota—and they are still dedicated to the change.

Figure 1 The gap between idea and action.

The search for the paradigm of change that would transform ideas into actions took me through the Group Dynamics Movement, the T-Group Movement, Tavistock Group Relations Conferences, The Milan Family Therapy Centre, and the Systems movement.

Group Dynamics

Group Dynamics provided tools and techniques for managing group processes. To that degree it was very helpful and insightful. However, in my experience, it has little impact in changing ideas into action.

The Group Dynamics strategy is to provide an “ah-ha” experience. It assumes that insight leads to action. The result is that most group dynamics programs are a series of unrelated exercises or role-plays, each of which provides some insight. If you add them up they are supposed to lead to understanding and that is supposed to lead to change.

Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

Next came the Tavistock Group Relations process, which was brilliant and quite effective, but so punitive and brutal in its impact that it created as many negative reactions as positive experiences. And even the positive experiences were positive upon reflection, not while being experienced. Consequently, I attempted to integrate the anaemic blandness of Group Dynamics with the rough treatment of the Tavistock Group Relations approach to create a process that would achieve the impact of the Tavistock method without the accompanying pain. Pierre Turquet (Director of the annual Tavistock Group Relations Conference before his early death) and I once ran such a programme together. However, it was not so much an integrated programme as two parallel tracks. He did his thing and I did mine.

Systems Thinking

The next development occurred when I became acquainted with the clinical applications of Systems Thinking. My wife, Bella Borwick, then Chairman of the Family Therapy Department at the University of Louvain, invited Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin of the Milan Family Therapy Centre to Brussels for a week to demonstrate their newly developed systemic techniques. I joined this group, although I am not a therapist.

Milan Family Therapy Institute

For a week I sat and marvelled at the brilliance of these two men. With tapes, stories, anecdotes, and live cases they demonstrated their systemic theory and techniques. They had cured anorexics, which had never been achieved until then; they cured catatonic patients in four or five months, they wrought marvellous changes in a brief time without huge conflicts. I was overwhelmed. If they could achieve such results with pathological patients, imagine what could be achieved in a business environment with normal, healthy managers.

Before they left Brussels I hired them to work with me for a year, two days a month, to develop their techniques for managers at ITT Europe, where I was the Director of Organization Development. For ten months we struggled and finally had to quit. Managers were calling me up and asking if I was trying to ruin their lives. What worked so well with families was a disaster with managers.

Permanent role versus temporary role

After some reflection, I began to develop a hypothesis. The techniques of the Milan Family Therapy Centre were powerful interventions that exploded and exposed the family system. No one in the family was threatened by such powerful interventions because it is impossible to lose your role in the family. You retain your role as mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter all your life. You may be the last remaining member of your family, but you will still retain these roles; they are permanent. On the other hand, your role in a business organization is always temporary. You can hold the title of Director for fifty years, but when you retire or leave the company you lose the company role and all the benefits that go with it. I hypothesized that the therapeutic interventions of the Milan approach threatened managers at work in a way they never threatened family members in the clinic. The managers felt in danger of losing their roles in the work system if they exposed that system. They feared losing their jobs and with it their livelihood, their economic security, and their families.

I made the decision then to develop a process equal to that developed by the Milan Family Therapy Group, based upon the same systemic theories and capable of achieving the same powerful results, swiftly, and without trauma or turbulence to the system. The goal was to create a programme and a process that would move people from ideas to action, that would, finally, change behaviour. The MODEL was in sight.

The search for the paradigm continues

For the next four and a half years I experimented with systemic theory to create a systemic programme. I worked with numerous colleagues during these years, but primarily three were involved: Gordon Lawrence (see Chapter Two), Bruce Reed (see Chapter Three), and Siggy Hirsch. Each supported the effort and contributed to the unfolding meaning and understanding of our experience. Gordon’s insights were particularly helpful. The first successful programme was the Group Strategy and Action Program®, which became a short circuit to change as if it was an integrated circuit compared to the vacuum tube technology that I had been using. What previously had taken years to change could be done in months or even weeks. As part of the development of the Group Strategy and Action Program^®, the Organizational Role Analysis was developed.

The role of role

The key issue in systemic change is to change the role and not the person or the organization. I was sensitized to roles because of my work with representatives of the Milan Institute. I began to look at the role and not the person. The abstract notion of systems became more concrete when I could think of people in their roles and not about their characters.

Role is the link between the individual and the organization. I am linked to my company by my role. If I lose the role I lose my connection to the organization. I am out of the system. The organization defines the role and hires someone to fill the role. The company needs a salesman, or an engineer, or a production manager. It does not necessarily need Sam or Joe, Ann or Louise. As Figure 2 emphasizes, a clear distinction can be made between a focus on “role” and a focus on the individual’s character.

Role is a pivotal factor in managing change. Prior to this we had focused on the individual or the organization. Often we use both approaches: the organizational followed by the individual. My new conception was of role connecting the individual to the organizational system, as depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 2 Focus on role, not on an individual’s character

I now realized that it was the role that had to change, not the person. And I immediately thought of my old boss. Many years ago I worked for a manager who was authoritarian, given to much screaming and shouting. One day, after attending a programme, he learned that one role of a manager is to listen. He redefined his role as a manager as one who also listens. He did not change his personality. At the next management meeting, after his traditional screams and shouts, he explained that he was now going to listen. He then gave the command, “Talk, I’m listening.” And he did listen. He had changed his understanding of his role—and consequently his behaviour—but not his personality.

Figure 3 The role-individual-organizational system triangle.

“Change without change”

To change the role yet not change the person is the challenge of what I call “Change without change”. We do it every day; change our role, but not our personality. Every time we change role we also change behaviour. In the office you may be commanding and decisive, but as a spouse you may be uncertain and diffident. You may be an obedient employee, but a domineering parent. It all depends how you understand your role, the rules of your system, and the relations you have established. One may think of the organization as a network of roles and relations governed by a set of rules, and various people take up those roles as they see them.

Changing the role can theoretically bring almost instant change in behaviour. Of course, the key to such change is the acceptance by the individual of the new role. It is even better if the individual creates the new role. In the case of a promotion, the job changes dramatically and the expectation for a changed behaviour is universal. But changing your role is not easy. Systems are like gravity; they have a weight and power that extends everywhere and is seen nowhere. The weight of your experience in your role and the power of others’ expectations can act as cement in maintaining the status quo. The strongest rationale for not changing one’s role is not knowing what one should do in one’s new role.

Organizational Role Analysis (ORA)

The management of change involves three major factors: The individual, the role, and the system. As I said above, Role connects the Individual to the System. As part of the Group Strategy and Action Program® process we created three major interventions: one intervention to deal with the individual (the Mapping Exercise), one to deal with the role (The Organizational Role Analysis), and the third to deal with the system (The Systems Analysis).

The Mapping Exercise introduces new information into the system. For the first time, for most people, the interior organization of their mental world is externalized so they can look at it on a piece of paper. They can see on this piece of paper what they were feeling or thinking in their head. For the first time, often, they can examine the “soft” data, i.e., feelings, intuition, etc., as specific, moveable, and manipulative data. They can and do begin to take what appear to be fixed ideas and treat them as temporary arrangements that can be altered.

The Organizational Role Analysis redefines the individual’s role in the system. Building upon the unfreezing of the internal map of the individual, the ORA makes it possible for the individual to explore, with the help of others, the current way in which the role is understood and managed by the organization but implemented by the manager in the role. The individual becomes an observer of herself; she can look at herself from outside the box.

The Systems Analysis provides the opportunity for the entire system to examine its relations. This is done collectively and in subsystems to visibly and conceptually understand what makes the system function the way it does. It is both an intervention and an analysis of the system.

This chapter concentrates on the ORA, which has its roots in many places. Let me try to pull together, after many years, some of the strands that went into the development of the ORA.

Hypothesis development

Sometime in the mid 1970s my wife, Bella Borwick, invited Harry Aponte from Philadelphia to work with her in Brussels. As part of the invitation, I agreed to utilize him to consult to me in ITT. This was partially to defray expenses for the university and also because I was always interested in new ideas. Aponte focused heavily on the use of hypotheses. His argument, which I found very persuasive, was that hypotheses are conjectures, guesses, hunches, but they are not facts. Unlike opinions, which are fixed and tend to induce defensive responses if the opinion is challenged, hypotheses are ephemeral. They may be accurate, but are probably not. You need to constantly update, improve, or throw them away and create new ones. As I like to say, you never marry a hypothesis, you only flirt with it.

Aponte worked with one of our managers for a day and was very helpful in bringing about a change. But what was important for me was the concept of hypothesis as a means of introducing ideas without creating conflict and of treating information as temporary not permanent. Truth exists, but we can only approximate it. Through constant redefining of our hypotheses we can get closer and closer to the truth, but we can never own it. This allows us to develop many ideas and not to get fixed or blocked into defending them. And even when we discover an hypothesis that appears to be accurate, to be true, it does not take long to discover that there are even deeper hypotheses that are more accurate. In other words, hypothesis development is a truly scientific methodology that aids us in pursuing knowledge and understanding, not in some distant theoretical way, but in a gut-wrenching, observational way, without inducing anger, conflict, strife, or resistance.

The ORA is structured around the development of hypotheses, not opinions. From beginning to end the ORA requires one to ask questions and to provide a hypothesis for each question. All discussion is around hypotheses; and all answers are conjectures or hypotheses. At no time does one try to pin “truth” down. One is always in a state of getting closer and closer to the “truth” but never arriving. This means that every hypothesis must be tested, challenged, and examined and newer, better, more accurate hypotheses developed.

Appearance versus “reality”

I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributor
• Introduction
• PART I: Organizational Role Analysis
• PART II: Organizational Role Analysis
• Concluding comments. Organizational Role Analysis: from here to where?
• References
• Bibliography
• Index