We come in through often through the HR door, right? And you have people who have different HR subspecies roles, like leadership, learning, talent, training, these kinds of things, right? And some of those people wouldn’t be happy being called HR people. And for those of you who are assaulted, by the way, I said, I am sorry. I know how you feel as a person who was training an OD. I never thought I was myself as an HR person, but I’ve just given up. Fine. But sometimes we’re hired not explicitly to develop people, and that tends to be the functionator because they’re interested in solving a business problem. And we still do the same thing with them because a big part of the reason why they’re not making as much progress on the business problem that they’re frustrated by, or a key part of the solution to achieving their business objectives, is ensuring the relevant people are having the right conversation with each other in the right way. When a C-suite executive, say, comes to me and says, and this is not how we promote ourselves, and we’re not a strategy firm. It says, we can’t align around a strategy at this high level.
It’s because they’re not talking to each other properly. And they’re not talking to each other in a way that’s surfacing the real issues, and that’s creating an agreement on what the core problems and opportunities are, and then therefore a clear view on what we need to do to seize those opportunities. It seems to always come back to Cander being compromised in some way because they never developed the capabilities, and they’re dealing with something that is complex and threatening and/or embarrassing for people. So they’re doing complex phenomena, and there’s going to be conflict in the conversation. And those Two things happen. It doesn’t matter how important it is. You get a group of people, it doesn’t matter how smart they are, it doesn’t matter how moral they are, how genuine and sincere their desire to good in the world is. This overprotective program kicks in and messes with people hard, and they don’t realize it, and then they blame each other for it. You know what I mean? But I’ve had a great saying that now I work with them back in the early early 2000s, the saying was, as long as we could solve any problem, as long as we can get together the right people in the room and can talk about it.
I believe that, man. I just want to turn it, and what we’ve done is we turn it into a skillset that’s learnable, and you can immediately apply to whatever business problem that you need to talk about with each other.
