From What to Who? - It's in Organisations

This post builds on the ideas I introduced in the previous post on the Who-What maturity model.

And like in my previous blog post, I've been noticing a distinct difference in the way most people communicate (and disagree) and the way great leaders communicate.

This pattern not only appears in the workplace where we have more apparent leader/subordinate structures - I've also noticed it in the the way community organisations communicate, and how parents (including my wife and I) relate to their children - we fit somewhere <----> on this maturity or awareness spectrum.

WHAT

HOW

WHY

WHO

Observation 3 - It's in Organisations

It's interesting that Simon Sinek found that great leaders start with "WHY?"

There's something more powerful than the "Why" - Simon did talk about it but he didn't spell it out. It's the "Who" - great leaders.

Here's an example in the workplace organisation I've noticed recently:
I've been a part of a safety working group and it always seems that we kept disagreeing with each other! It could be a definition of a word or an activity (the What). People get their noses out of joint when their word or activity is misunderstood or omitted. The solution was to write some huge documents, some became so long that many have voiced whether any would have the time to read them. End of last year I took Simon Sinek's approach and tried to communicate the intent of what we are doing - so that the "What?" or "How?" becomes secondary to the "Why?" question. This helped us figure out whether proposal A or proposal B came first.  It really helped reduce the TODO list.

But that's not where my learning stopped.

When I shifted to thinking more about the "Who?" question - I realised the organisation had limited performance because the "Who needs to be capable?" question had not been asked. Focusing on the "Who?" helped the team make some huge leaps forward - thinking about training/awareness/clear processes, standards and tools. Instead of having huge documents and detailed procedures, we shifted that energy to growing capability in a few safety leaders. These leaders embodied the intent ("Why?") and could pull off the approach ("How?") and show others.

As a result, we managed to cover a lot of ground where we would normally get bogged down in decision fatigue or indecision as our paper trail strains to catch up.

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Some of you might notice that this echos the Bradley Maturity Curve, where a network of people/relationships move up the maturity curve together. Growing the capability or the "Who?" is a core element of moving up the curve.

The growth goes like this:

REACTIVE

DEPENDENT

INDEPENDENT

INTERDEPENDENT

So what if maturity levels were related to the language that people used?

So tell me,

• What style of language do you hear in your family the most?
• What style of language tends to have the most impact?