Doing Business with Flow — Part 2
Part 2 of the series. Re-read part 1 here.
How can we bring Flow to our business life? What prevents Flow from happening on the job of our team members and how do we build Flow in organisations and everyday life?
According to recent surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization, 15–20% of all employees seem never to experience flow. The same number claims to experience it every day. Those in-between feel flow anywhere from once every few months to at least once a week. That's where managers can pick up the opportunity and help more people into more and longer states of flow.
We can help to train redirecting attention — the brain’s capacity to process information — towards the tasks at our hand. This way,, we can focus psychic energy to help us work.
Why is flow not happening at work?
In knowledge-intensive business settings, where every manager has to oversee massive amounts of information as well as people, facilitating the use of psychic energy becomes a primary concern. In such firms it is true that “the scarcest resource is attention,” yet far too much of this resource is mismanaged and wasted because we have no idea how to deal with it effectively.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 77). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
That is why slack, with instant attention-drawing notifications, is killing managers capabilities for effective work.
When a person uses up a fraction of his life and nothing complex results from it, he is wasting psychic energy. By contrast psychological capital is built up when the attention invested results in a more complex consciousness — more refined skills, a fuller understanding of some subject, a deeper relationship. This usually takes place when we use our skills to confront a higher level of challenges — in other words, when we experience flow.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 78). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Managers need to invest their soft skills and their social capital into building psychological capital. Skills that help to live and working better. Csikszentmihalyi points out that most people like to work when that work provides them flow, there are only a few jobs so designed, that the making flow possible.
This is where management can make a real difference. While not even the most gifted leader can force her workers to enjoy and grow on their jobs, there is a great deal that even an average manager can do to make the workplace more amenable to flow.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 81). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“Even average manager can do” — Is that great news for me? ;-)
While for most of human history people didn’t “work” in the modern sense, even today there are still a few individuals — usually among artists, writers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs — who choose when and how to work and control what they do. They claim that it is equally true that they never worked a day in their lives as it is to say that they worked every minute of their lives. They are at their jobs while in the shower, while driving the car, while making spaghetti sauce; their minds are constantly struggling with problems, turning them around, examining them from new angles. But to them, this intense activity feels as effortless as breathing.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 89). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
That my life. And life of the people that I want to have in my team and be surrounded with. Recognizing that work is not that what happens when you sit at a desk but is what happens all the time, wherever you are and think and breathe, is elementary for a manager in the 21st century, in a business life that moves towards remoteness, distributedness.
Blockers for Flow in business
Blocker no. 1: missing clear goals. Goals, that are also the worker’s own, rather than just the organization’s. If you do not understand why you are doing what you are doing, you will never get into the flow. And a lot of companies are missing to get everyone on board and translate the companies goals to the own goals.
Blocker no 2: contemporary jobs seldom provide adequate feedback. Immediate feedback, thoughtful feedback. Not just: you are doing ok.
Blocker no 3: micromanagement. You only can keep on going the flow when you feel you are under control of what you are doing. If someone else tells you what to do, micromanages you, you will not be able to feel that sense of control. I am guilty myself — too often jumping into my mates work and telling them what I want them to do, instead of giving them space to do things their way. Which is 99% the better way.
The DNA of Flow in Organizations
Go with remote work
Almost all human groups need some form of hierarchy, a ladder of increasing responsibility and power. Every complex system has a division of labor, a specialization of functions that includes mechanisms of control. But the need for control from above must be balanced against the need for autonomy that even the hum-blest person holds dear. Especially destructive is the behavior of those managers who insist upon controlling others not for the benefit of the organization but to bolster their own personal quest for power. In such by no means rare cases, subordinates become unwilling to sacrifice their own lives for another person’s selfish agenda, and begin to withdraw psychic energy from the job.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 95). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This is gold. It's exactly the purpose why I advocate distributed and asynchronous work: Give the people full control of their work and let them work wherever, whenever and however they want to work.
Greate an Atmosphere of Flow
The truth of the matter in business is that you don’t do anything by yourself. You have to create an atmosphere in which people want to give their best. You don’t order anybody to do their best. You couldn’t order Beethoven to compose the Ninth Symphony. He’s got to want to do it. And so the head of a business is an enabler rather than a doer.
(…)
More substantive ways of improving the business environment involve setting policies that allow people to move and act with freedom, to have control over their tasks, and to have input in decisions affecting their work.Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (pp. 107–113). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Clear Mission, clear Goals
Level 1: People, Product, Purpose
Create clarity to make the goals clear. What's the mission of the organization and what will that mean for everyone?
While selecting, training, and promoting staff is the most time-consuming element, providing purpose is equally essential: “People say, what do you mean by ‘purpose?’ Purpose is the time that you spend with people constantly going over and over and over in their minds, what is the purpose of this whole undertaking. Why are you doing that job? Why are we on this particular crusade? What’s the purpose of this enterprise? What’s the purpose of your contribution? There’s a little bit of preaching involved in that. Some people say it’s motivation. I say, it’s more than motivation. It’s creating a sense of purpose in an organization.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 117). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Level 2: Make it clear for Managers
If the managers do not know how their individual contribution will load to the company goals, they cannot coach or mentor. They will fall back to “managing”.
How can we deal with that? Csikszentmihalyi states:
The most effective means of doing so is to set aside time to have occasional conversations with each team member, during which they can be questioned about what they think the main goals of their work are. In lieu of this informal approach, the same purpose can be achieved in public meetings.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 119). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Puting Soul into Business
And first: Start with hiring:
The most effective means of doing so is to set aside time to have occasional conversations with each team member, during which they can be questioned about what they think the main goals of their work are. In lieu of this informal approach, the same purpose can be achieved in public meetings.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 119). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
SO true. Nothing to add. We changed our recruiting process 180 degrees to focus solely on cultural fit. Costs a lot of time, loads of money but in the end: it's worth it.
Purpose of Business
“People want to work for a cause, not just for a living.” A paycheck is a sufficient impetus to motivate some employees to do the minimum amount to get by, and for others, the challenge of getting ahead in the organization provides a satisfactory focus for a while. But these incentives alone are rarely strong enough to inspire workers to give their best to their work.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 143). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Still struggling with that. We need to make money, we need to take projects that we will not always be a fan of. But I do not want to support industries that do the wrong thing. Military? No go. Dictators? No go. Cigarettes, alcohol, gambling? I don't know. I don't want to, but if it can help me create better work live for everyone? Struggling. A lot.
What helps me? This:
Find a place where you can function at 100 percent, where your values and skills will have a chance to be fully expressed. In other words an environment with soul, where work can be flow.(…)
Conclusion:
To summarize briefly the essential conditions for flow to occur, they are: clear goals that can be adapted to meet changing conditions; immediate feedback to one’s actions; and a matching of the challenges of the job with the worker’s skills.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Good Business (p. 203). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Nothing to add. My challenge: Leveraging that to the level of remote, distributed work. How can we, as workforce that will determine the future of good work, push those preconditions towards new work? How can we really un-cage work?
Looking forward to get into discussion.
