Corporate listening

A line in another Stuart Henshall post (I am so glad he is back to blogging again) got me thinking:

If you want a conversation to really take hold in a company you have to teach the CEO how to listen.

It got me wondering how much listening Mark Thompson is doing at the BBC at the moment and then I thought that if he was then it would be "corporate listening". The sort of listening managed by internal comms departments that is meant to make you feel reassured but in fact makes you very scared.

Comments

[andy]

I think the current changes here at the Beeb are a perfect illustration of the failings of hierarchy in an organisation of this scale. MT is heavily buffered off from what really goes on around here so he has no option but to make decisions based on the organisation as he sees it, top down. The trouble is, the organisation he sees isn't the organisation we've really got. He and the board simply have no visibility of the swan's feet paddling under the water, because they've deliberately chosen not to look there. The scope for change is huge, but many of the most beneficial changes for everyone - staff and audiences alike - are hidden in the detail of the way we go about doing our jobs. If he wants efficiency savings he has to to address waste - not by cutting great swathes out of the organisation but by examining how we do what we do - and the people who know that most intimately, warts and all, are the people who actually do it. But as you say, is he listening? Only from behind a closed door.

I had a post brewing on this; it angers and depresses me to see so much potential for improvement ignored.

[tim]

MT is listening. This is staff mandated change, he embraces digital media to produce, distribute and allow a conversation around content, he has removed swathes of administration ( even euan :> ) and he does have a vision and communicates this with passion.

MT has to walk a tricky path what with the risks of senior controllers/executives not fully supporting him/spinning against him, the trust flexing it's muscle, the unions protecting its members, the staff feeling the force of continuous change and Siemens being er..Siemens.

All this does lead to a challenging environment for internal coversations around the BBC and change can be a strange thing/process to communicate and deliver.

I wonder if half the problem of communcating/delivering change is about asking people to question and understand their thoughts and views on the organisation they work in. Often the blocks, the institutionalisation is in their heads, it isn't real, it doesn't exist.

Nice usable tools to surface these assumptions is what the BBC needs, I expect Euan could advise!

Discourse creates reality

[Euan Semple]

Goodness knows what you mean by "staff mandated change" Tim - whoever you are!

I actually wrote something before I left about getting rid of more people, faster, but on entirely different criteria from the ones being applied. If you keep people with energy, commitment and a willingness to work together - and lose everyone else you get a sustainable organisation but of this is of course very, very hard to do. If you do what he is doing and salami slice on the basis of numbers you get a smaller number of the same disfunctional mix you had before and are in even more trouble.

Obviously I believe that the tools we put in had started to show how conversations with staff could be changed and I agree completely that asking the right questions and helping people really think about what is going on is the way forward. However while I was still there were only a few managers who understood this and had the guts to apply it - and Mark wasn't one of them.

If he has truly understood what the changes in expectations of his staff are in terms of the sorts of conversations we had in t.g. and has begun to engage with them on these terms then I am impressed - but from what I have heard elsewhere I will also be very surprised.

As to my own departure I was ready to go and will be forever grateful I was able to do so when I did.

Thanks for commenting though!