A CONVERSATION –D FOR DATA ; D FOR DRAMA THERE IS MORE DRAMA THAN DATA IN LIFE HOW WILL DATA SCIENCE WORK ?? - sudhanshu

A CONVERSATION –

D FOR DATA ; D FOR DRAMA

THERE IS MORE DRAMA THAN DATA IN LIFE

HOW WILL DATA SCIENCE WORK ??

NAMRATA – Good day Sir !!!

SUDHANSHU – Good day to you too !!! What’s your agenda today.

Namrata – The other day you were very sceptical about Data Science – Data Analytics etc. You used a phrase that these days there is more Drama than Data. Data today is disruptively dysfunctional.

Sudhanshu – Yes I said and it is true. As a committed lover of reality and a student of the facts, my career has been built on deconstructing conventional wisdom and helping people stop counterproductive practices. I do a lot of scientific reflection on reality of today. As I do reflection, counterintuitive truths often emerge. When I find something to be the opposite of what I had thought was true, I get super jazzed because of the opportunities that presents.

I was dealing with consulting project in Technology few years back - The technology worked just fine. The resistance to the change, however, eroded the potential efficiency it was designed to create. The study made that visible. Over the years, it has become clear to me that this study was no outlier. I have observed the same phenomenon with team after team, with department after department, and in organization after organization.

In my last organisation where I was a Vice Chancellor and also before that where I was a Director – I saw - Drama generating emotional waste, draining the organization’s time and energy. It contributes to destroying the most considered and strategic business decisions. I felt like calling myself a drama manager. This is one reason why I don’t do much business research and would rather write conceptual books for if I do research I feel like a drama researcher, and such research was not at the heart of my work for quite sometime.

Namrata – But then how do you substantiate that ???

Sudhanshu - Taking a Fresh Look After several years of working in organizations, I decided to revisit, expand, and validate that original research project. We wanted to see how things might have changed since the early since last 3 decades and to expand our knowledge about how leaders deal with emotional waste. We surveyed some leaders from more than 25 companies that represent medical, technology, manufacturing, and financial organizations. For purposes of the survey, we defined “emotional waste” as “mentally wasteful thought processes or unproductive behavior that keeps leaders or their teams from delivering the highest level of results.” We created questions to calculate the time leaders spend dealing with the workplace drama that generates emotional waste, behaviors such as:

1. Lack of ownership, accountability, commitment

2. Blaming circumstances or other people for lack of results

3. Arguing with circumstances that were nonnegotiable 4. Resistance to change

5. Lack of buy-in to organizational strategies

6. Spreading gossip

7. Projecting (and believing) made-up stories instead of focusing on facts

8. Defensiveness to feedback

9. Dealing with hurt feelings

I also wanted to know whether leaders believed that dealing with those behaviors was a good use of their time. It asked whether leaders had training programs to deal with such issues and whether their efforts to stop emotional waste worked. Organizations invest heavily in HR-sponsored initiatives such as employee engagement programs, leadership training, and other ways to increase productivity, so we also surveyed Human Resources leaders. We wanted to discover how much time HR leaders saw disappearing due to emotional waste and the kinds of drama they saw fueling it. Did they see defusing drama as a productive use of their time? Of leaders’ time? Finally, we wanted to get a vivid picture of how drama shows up. Our analysis could illuminate how much emotional waste is costing the bottom line and give us a feel for the cultural collateral damage (i.e., lowered motivation and morale) it causes.

Namrata – What were the findings ???

Sudhanshu - The Punch line was : Emotional Waste Is Increasing.

The biggest surprise that emerged from the study was that, since the 1990s, time lost in drama at work had increased. The data showed leaders were spending almost 2.5 hours a day in drama that creates emotional waste at work. Sit with that number for a moment. Roll it around in your head. Nearly 2.5 hours a day, more than 17 hours a week, 68 hours a month, 816 hours a year, multiplied by the number of people in your organization, is leaking out of the business. These numbers likely reveal what you already have felt at work: the wasted time, the energy drain, and the difficulty accomplishing things that shouldn’t be that hard.

Namrata - What did the survey say ??

In the survey, leaders were asked to identify the major sources of drama that they experienced (“drama” was defined as “mentally wasteful thought processes or unproductive behaviors”). There was high agreement between the leaders’ group and the HR leaders’ group on major sources of drama. Based on the highest-ranked sources of drama on which they spent the most time, the responses boiled down to five major categories (a scattering of one-off listings were outliers and accounted for 10 percent of the responses, of which the highest was 3 percent and the rest were minimal): These are the five categories traditional leadership philosophy has concentrated on for more than 30 years. And the focus of our work is to move beyond these worn-out leadership philosophies and strategies and to call for very different approaches to these sources of drama. To reduce the amount of emotional waste in the workplace, leaders need to challenge current thinking about these five categories. The role of leadership must change so it can more effectively address the waste and drama created by these behaviors and mental processes. In addition, leaders need to be better equipped to defuse the drama driven by these main sources of emotional waste. Leaders who become fluent in bypassing the ego will address more than 30 percent of the issues and have the biggest opportunity to eliminate waste in the workplace by facilitating No Ego Moments with their teams. The remainder of the sources of waste can be addressed by evolving the current thinking in HR and leadership development by questioning long-held beliefs and assumptions about change management, engagement, accountability, and buy-in. Almost half of the leaders surveyed recognized that dealing with drama behaviors was not a productive use of their time. And 62 percent said they had learning and development tools and programs to deal with the issue. But in spite of such resources, 2.5 hours a day continued to leak out of the productivity pipeline due to emotional waste. The average worker spends 2.5 hours per day in drama.

Namrata - What is the solution ???

Sudhanshu – You have to address certain important questions -

Why is this happening?

Why aren’t those tools, techniques, and training working?

What is preventing leaders from plugging up the leaks emotional waste generates?

Traditional tools and programs being taught and used over the last few decades simply don’t work for six reasons:

1. They feed the ego.

2. They tolerate dissent to nonnegotiable strategic decisions.

3. They focus on fostering engagement but without accountability, which leads to entitlement.

4. They coddle people’s preferences rather than helping them grow their business readiness.

5. They don’t help employees develop better mental processes through reflection and heightened self-awareness.

6. They actually generate, rather than eliminate, emotional waste.

This list reflects the flawed logic that Human Resource philosophies and programs have been delivering to leaders for years, with serious, damaging results. Employee engagement and change management programs employed over the last three decades are broken and have proven to be counterproductive. The result has been that organizations are inadvertently creating coddled workforces that demand leaders motivate them, boost morale, and make them happy. How is that even possible? Today’s work experience is so full of emotional waste that for many people, it’s seen as normal. It’s considered a cost of doing business, an inevitable surtax you pay for working with complex human beings. But once our research had identified, named, and helped us understand emotional waste, it was clear that the financial impact was real.

Namrata - How to help people recapture the time spent on fruitless drama and redirect it to add value and great results.

Sudhanshu - Hello, by REALITY CHECK !! –

My Name Is Reality. Have We Met?

We all have mental filters that distort or obscure reality and transform it into a self-serving, ego-approved story. Our stories are invented to make us look good or excuse our lack of action. They support our viewpoints so that we can get what we want. These stories make us feel safe, let us off the hook, and give us someone to blame when we don’t get what we want. The mental filters are the opposite of prescription eyeglasses, which are designed to help us see more clearly. I had to be a therapist to see great benefit in helping my employees /people, team members to bypass ego and get acquainted with reality. We worked together to deconstruct ego-infused stories to reveal the circumstances as they truly existed. One of my strategies was to help people find the facts rendered invisible by the mental filters they used to interpret circumstances. Their perceived unhappiness, lack of success, or reluctance to be fully engaged at work had to do with deep-seated, often subconscious desires to bend reality. In organizations, HR and leadership philosophies about change management and employee engagement have been based on, counterproductive assumptions that allow and even encourage people to argue with reality. The thinking is that if leaders can soften the blows of change and focus on people’s comfort and happiness, employees will be committed and produce better results. Many leaders and HR professionals believe that asking people what will make them feel engaged, and then meeting those demands, leads to happy, successful employees. That’s another form of telling employees that great results come from changing reality. But it doesn’t work. Reality can’t be changed.

Namrata - How about EGO ??

What do you do with ego ??

Sudhanshu –

HAVE A NO EGO CULTURE

NO EGO BELIEF -

Somebody said – who I don’t remember –“Suffering is optional and usually self-imposed.”

It’s a - The Leadership Buffet - Modern organizations approach leadership strategies like a buffet. Each leader often chooses his or her own HR-blessed approaches and solutions—whether evidence shows the approach to be effective or not. This approach inserts massive variance into organizations that demand tight processes based on solid evidence. It is a departure from how most companies typically manage productivity, which is to maximize resources by standardizing best practices based on data and business insights. Human Resources has come under a lot of scrutiny and criticism in the last several years. In 2015, I remember reading the Harvard Business Review which even called for HR to be blown up. HR needs to be a strong advocate for excellence. But too often, HR has been the dispenser of conventional wisdom that has only transactional or incremental impact. Leaders don’t view dealing with drama as a good use of their time or capabilities. In fact, I would like to make it clear that HR resources, training, and development aren’t actually solving the emotional waste problem, and most people don’t realize the philosophy and tools are actually contributing to drama. The question becomes: If companies blow up HR, what’s to be done with the rubble? The HBR article advocated an HR “long view” that is directly connected to the pressures businesses are encountering. Reality-Based Leadership is about that: a simple approach, backed by science, using intentional mental processes and higher consciousness to reduce drama and eliminate emotional waste. That’s what I would say. Ultimately, leadership is about manifestation of the truth by directly confronting reality. Reality-Based Leadership processes and techniques interrupt nonproductive thinking. They show people how to bypass the ego to create self-awareness, reveal new truths, and settle the mind. The easy-to-implement approaches drive big results. We show leaders how to call people to greatness, over and over again in daily conversations, to bring out something that already exists within each willing employee. As employees internalize these mental processes, they begin to self-manage, become more productive, and, as a result, understand the connection between their choices and their states of mind and the results they deliver. Anyone can achieve this, but it starts with leaders. In the Reality-Based Leadership, I reflected and approximated that 32 percent of the time they spend dealing with drama in the workplace is spent addressing what I call “ego behaviors.” These include:

• Dealing with hurt feelings, misinterpretation, or speculation

• Dealing with employee hearsay or gossip

• Handling defensiveness and/or resistance to feedback

• Dealing with employees who vent or complain

• Managing workplace gossip

• Addressing employees who tattle on or judge others

• Addressing employees who compare their situations with others

These behaviors are common symptoms of the ego being engaged, bruised, chafed, or battered. The cost of emotional waste is staggering. Ego-based resistance to change, employee disengagement, lack of alignment to strategic initiatives, and the lack of buy-in is costing companies millions of dollars per year. And while there is no lack of training, tools, and techniques available, the root causes of emotional waste haven’t been dealt with. You have the opportunity to start addressing those causes and to do so immediately.

Much Love

sudhanshu