The Organisation Always Warns You First
Heather wasn't the obvious choice to address 500 senior managers and board members. Before becoming a conference speaker she had been a swimwear model.
Forty-five minutes later she had the room in the palm of her hand.
She spoke without notes. She was funny, serious, honest and occasionally angry. She wasn't talking about strategy, structures or finance. She was talking about trust, hope, pride and the memory of broken promises.
She said there were two types of senior manager. Those who expect employees to distrust them. And those who are genuinely surprised to discover they do.
Different assumptions. Same mistake.
Neither group actively manages the organisation's emotional assets.
The consequences are familiar. Restructuring takes far longer than expected and sometimes never really finishes before the next restructuring begins. Strategies are well designed but never quite deliver. Policies make sense but fail to change behaviour. Procedures exist on paper but are quietly ignored when no one is watching.
Heather never used the phrase The Emotional Organisation. She didn't need to. She was describing exactly how it behaves.
I have previously argued that every organisation contains two organisations. The Formal Organisation manages structures, budgets, policies and performance. The Emotional Organisation is built on trust, hope, pride and organisational memory.
This article takes the argument one step further.
These emotional assets do more than explain why organisations behave as they do. They provide an early warning system. Managers who learn to read the signs can often predict tomorrow's problems before they appear in next month's performance report.
Every organisation keeps a close eye on its financial health. Boards monitor budgets, liabilities and risk. They do not wait until the organisation is in financial trouble before taking action.
No finance director would tell the board, "Let's wait six months before checking whether we're running out of money."
Yet many organisations are perfectly happy to wait six months for the next employee survey before checking whether they're running out of trust.
By then they are already overdrawn.
The emotional balance sheet is not a spreadsheet. It is a way of judging whether the organisation's emotional assets are becoming stronger or weaker.
Every decision a manager makes creates either a deposit into, or a withdrawal from, the organisation's emotional balance sheet.
Like a financial balance sheet, it identifies emerging risks before they become crises.
The early warning signs are rarely hidden. Managers see them every day. The problem is they explain them away. They call them resistance, negativity or change fatigue instead of asking what these behaviours are trying to tell them.
Trust is usually the first asset to weaken. You know it is slipping when people believe the rumour before they believe the manager. Every decision is second-guessed. Every explanation is assumed to hide another motive. Employees look to colleagues for reassurance because they no longer expect it from their leaders.
Hope disappears more quietly. Meetings become quieter, not louder. New ideas dry up. The challenge stops. People shrug and say, "Nothing will change." Managers often mistake this for acceptance. It is usually resignation.
Pride can fail in two different ways. Some people become detached. "It's just a job." Others become fiercely defensive. Any criticism feels personal. One response is emotional withdrawal. The other is emotional overinvestment. Neither reflects a healthy organisation.
Then there is organisational memory. It is often the strongest predictor of what happens next. A new initiative is announced and someone says, "We've tried that before." Managers hear resistance. What they are really hearing is accumulated disappointment.
Trust can recover. Hope can return. Pride can be rebuilt.
Organisational memory never disappears.
Every promise made today is measured against promises made years ago.
None of these warning signs appears on a performance dashboard. They do not feature in the quarterly report. They rarely reach the board until they have already become problems.
Managers see them every day, if they know what they are looking for.
Too many leaders believe distrust is inevitable. Others assume trust comes with the job title. Both are wrong. Trust, hope, pride and organisational memory are organisational assets. They need managing as carefully as financial assets.
The Formal Organisation measures the consequences. The Emotional Organisation reveals the risks.
The Formal Organisation gives managers data on absence, turnover and grievances after the event.
The Emotional Organisation tells them what is about to happen.
The organisation always warns you first.
The question is whether anyone in management is listening.
blairmcpherson.co.uk
