Rick Karash wrote:
>When I've had admin people in systems thinking programs, the critical
issue is to get them out of the "woe is us, we're powerless" mindset.
I've found they often have pretty good systems thinking skills, they can
see the structure that's causing problems, but what can they do about it?
In the setting in which you're working, can you make them a real part of
the team, able to cause changes to problematic structures? This would be
the break-through, I think.
The workshop I'm designing (I have just run the pilot with 16 people) to
"Revalue Support/Admin Staff" is essentially a leadership course designed
to get them to challenge the envelopes of their authority (real and
imagined) and use the unique positions they occupy (at the hubs of formal
and informal communication) and the knowledge they gain there, as
important contributions to team effort - The workshop has a large focus on
the (leadership) roles admin/support staff can play in enhancing the
culture (celebratory, personal caring, atmosphere/decor etc.) in the
organisation - essentially identifying opportunities to celebrate,
listening into the corridor for the organisational pain, getting people to
talk about organisational architecture and decor and then for all of
these, organising solutions. My experience also is that admin staff know
how to party and are more people friendly than most - probably because
with relatively boring jobs their repressed creativity goes more into
their personal/social lives. Because support staff do not usually
intellectually expressed it is unvalued, but it is precisely becuase they
tend not to intellectualise but stick with the heart (and feet) that .
The support staff of one of the organisations on the pilot have in fact
drawn up a plan and a budget for their new (proposed) roles as celebratory
cultural leaders!
It does requires a hefty unloading (Woe is me) session to begin with, done
through a deep listening exercise (posted earlier) and followed by a good
session on personal visioning (the exercise in the Fieldbook is excellant
but I've added a finger-painting, non-verbal dimension at the beginning).
Lapsing into victim mode is usually the default but once they have got it
out and shared their pain it does seem to clear the way for a constructive
process to build their own informed and positive assertiveness. The
workshop ideally has people from several different organisations (as
happened in the pilot) which enables a counselling dynamic to emerge and
seems to give strength to counter the woe is me victim mentality. In fact
the 16 participants have used the opportunity to form a "Support Staff
Learning network" having at the workshop shared lists of their
strengths/skills and intending to resource each other - let see if it
happens.
On the issue of how to become part of the team and change problematic
structures, what I did was invite their managers into the worskhop for the
last half day to discuss the organisational changes that need to take
place to enhance the roles of the support staff and to plan processes to
get other staff on board. Very importantly the support staff, with their
managers, will not use meetings to get the other staff onboard but are
going to workshop methods (preceded by the deep listening exercise) to do
so. They identified that meetings were one of the biggest sources of
their disempowerment and will try to get the organisations to use
workshops to deal with developmental issues.
I am now convinced that not only will motivated and skilled admin staff
make a big difference at a technical level but perhaps even more so at a
cultural level.
Thanks for the response
-- Doug Reeler New Horizons Development Services 146 St. Kilda Road, Lansdowne, Cape Town, South Africa, 7780 Tel/Fax: (21) 6961475 dreeler@iaccess.za