WholePerson at Work

The W h o l e P e r s o n a t Wo r k

The Whole Person at Work Russell Connor

About the Author: Russell Connor is the Managing Director of Dynamic Link (www.dynamiclink.com).

Dynamic Link uses a Work Levels framework to help fully appreciate an individual’s capability and to match people to jobs.

Acknowledgements: Dynamic Link acknowledges the important influence of Elliott Jaques, Gillian Stamp and Mihalyi Csíkszentmihályi

Overview: Profiling people has become associated with assessing personality using sophisticated psychometric instruments. At the same time an emphasis, especially in the area of leadership, has been placed on identifying behaviour and competences. Whilst there are benefits to these approaches the essence of the person can be lost in the process.

Russell argues that in order to really understand the being in human being you have to go beyond concepts of personality or just focusing on behaviour. It is necessary to go upstream to the source of behaviour- to the thinking process.

Limitations of Many Psychologically Based Approaches People seem to like to put a label on others and say that they are this or that kind of person. Many psychological approaches to people-profiling provide nice easy labels and this may account for their popularity. However individuals resent being labelled themselves for the very real reason that they do behave in different ways in different situations.

Many standard psychologically based profiling tools are designed to neatly ‘box’ someone. However, they not only create the impression that people are unable to flex their behaviour once labelled, they also lose the essence of the person in the analysis.

The following approaches have severe limitations when it comes to fully understanding a person at work:

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Personality factors. Traits and factors don’t take into account context - but human beings are highly context sensitive, Competency frameworks. These often focus on behaviour- but behaviour is an output:– an end result of something else, EQ. Emotional awareness is important but emotions are difficult to name, often come from deep within us and are often the result of how we interpret the world and make meaning.

In terms of broader analyses, many approaches to organisation development rest on psychological theories that see aspects of business life such as interpersonal stresses, aggression and damaging game-playing as the results of psychological processes involving the unconscious.

As a natural follow-on, practitioners utilising these underlying ideas espouse that in

The W h o l e P e r s o n a t Wo r k to this is highly relevant as: Our ability to think, especially our ability to think about thinking, defines us as human beings, Thoughts and words are incredibly powerful, - they have caused many of the great unions and the great conflicts throughout

order to change behaviour, it is necessary to change the psychological make-up of individuals. The change programmes that result are often slow and painful.

Broader Perspective People management experience Motivation and values

Personal style

Professional/ technical/ functional skills and knowledge

Professional/ technical/ functional skills and knowledge requirements

As well as addressing personality, behaviour and competences it is also necessary focus on critical areas that are often neglected. Namely; the breadth and depth of a person’s perspective on their world.

Perspective is the building of a ‘mentalmodel’ that provides a person with the core capability to deal with a certain level of uncertainty, make judgements and handle ambiguity.

If ‘thinking’ is focused on when profiling people it is often limited to the classic aptitudes related to logical reasoning and analysis. However, a person’s perspective on the world and the thinking that gives rise

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Team Working Organisational culture

Core capability

To fully appreciate a person, it is necessary to take a rounded view and always look at them in terms of the context of the work that is required.

People management requirements

Core contribution

Awareness of our thinking intentions is real self-insight, We value what we think about and we think about what we value, We are not trained to think strategically, yet this is key to ‘direction-giving’.

The Whole Human Being To really understand the ‘being’ in human being it is necessary to go upstream to the source; to the thinking process. When the thinking process is addressed it is possible to embrace the essence of human experience and to recognise that: People are ‘meaning-making’ and ‘meaning-seeking’ beings, Meaning comes from our narrative, which is the story that we tell about ourselves to ourselves,

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Th e W h o l e P e r s o n at Work Our narrative attempts to make sense of ambiguities, conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes and contradictions.

What is Ambiguities, conflicts, contradictions and paradox (now)? are at the heart of being human but some people have mental models that enables them to handle more of these than others.

Our choices to act are often limited by our ability to construct meaning and by our handling of the factors such as ambiguity and paradox.

People make meaning in all areas of their life; family, social and spiritual. Clearly they also make meaning for themselves and others in a work context. To fully understand people in work, it is necessary to understand this work context.

People in a Work Context Work Levels is management system that makes a direct connection between context, job contribution and personal capability. Using this it is possible to define the scope of work and the personal capability that is required to meet this.

In the Work Levels system any job in a commercial setting can be allocated to one of a specific number of levels each with its own theme, purpose and core contribution. Core contribution describes the outputs of the job. The value of these to the organisation is in direct proportion to the complexity of the environment in which decisions have to be made. Based on this, the mirror image is established which relates to the people requirements. As such, and by making the connection, a dynamic link between people and jobs is formed.

These levels cover all the work undertaken in an enterprise from the highly routine and repetitive to the most varied and strategic. This work spectrum corre-

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sponds to a shift in required perspective as illustrated in the following diagram.

What needs to be done (soon)?

What could be (in the future)?

A person’s perspective has to broaden and deepen as the key question moves from ‘what work do I need to do now’ to ‘what work will we be doing in years to come?’

Specific Thinking Activities and Types of Work There are specific thinking activities that are especially relevant for particular levels of work. These provide the necessary perspective to undertake a particular type of work with comfort. Global Profiling S y s t e m ( w w w. g l o b a l - p r o f i l i n g system.com) is a good example of an integrated Work Levels model. In this, level specific thinking capabilities are identified for each of six separate levels.

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Value, envisage

5

Reframe, symbolise, interconnect

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Model, parallel process, scenario plan

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Connect, link, contingency plan

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Diagnose, follow the logic, reason, analyse, accumulate

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Attend, select

Our thinking capabilities sets the conditions for feeling in-tune with the work undertaken.

To use the phrase first coined by M Csíkszentmihályi people are likely to feel ‘in flow’ when the challenge of the job is

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Th e W h o l e P e r s o n at Work matched by their ability to get their head around it. When in-flow, people are comfortable with using the capability that still differentiates humans from the mightiest computer, namely an ability to act even though there are gaps in the data and to use judgement.

Through asking the right questions it is possible to appreciate the scope and scale of the mental models and perspective that a person draws upon to make sense of situations for themselves and act sensibly even though not all that they are dealing with is known and familiar.

Without the relevant thinking capabilities, a person will feel uncomfortable and out of their depth. This sense of being out-of-flow has important consequences as shown in the diagram below.

Work Levels is a set of ideas that enables practitioners to appreciate the perspective and mental models that people bring to the world of work. Work Levels based assessment methods provide insight into a individual’s thinking skills that enables them to make sense of their situation.

What do People Experience in Work?

In

Fl ow

Challenge

Anxiety Worry Perplexity

Frustration Boredom Anxiety

When seeking to understand people it is necessary to recognise the limitations of using standard questionnaires that take no account of context. Data-gathering tools have to be used as a starting point for dialogue rather than as a means to provide definitive judgements.

References and Acknowledgements.

In his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great freedom, enjoyment, fulfillment, and skill.

It is also necessary to engage in a dialogue that is uncluttered by praticed responses that so often occurs in interview situation.

Dynamic Link also acknowledges the important influence of Elliott Jaques and Gillian Stamp.

Utilisation of current capability Adopted from M. Csíkszentmihályi

Conclusion

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As a result Work Levels can help organisations to: Improve the quality of the thinking relevant to the type of work being undertaken, Prepare those in or approaching transition into work requiring different ways of thinking, Offer specific help to people who have to think strategically.

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