Increasing Managerial Effectiveness
Cultures of Inquiry and Motivation
Cycle-2 brings in cultural values which no longer focus on brute activities, but rather on ensuring those activities are indeed well directed and energetically pursued.
The next three stages of management development are:
These are about managers and the organization becoming increasingly effective through progressively greater mastery of reality. 
But what reality?
The are in essence inquiry and motivational technologies. Their ingrained use gives precise definition and substance to the potentially vague notion of a «learning organization».
The final stages enable managers to become progressively more energized and engaged. Enthusiasm, determination, positive involvement, and service beyond the call of duty are all markedly enhanced by:
■ impacts of brute facts:
■ personal aspirations and commitment:
■ engagement with social forces:
Eventually all modes must be worked with simultaneously. But introducing them to a diverse group of unprepared managers requires some recognition of their step-wise logic. The order that enables learning and strengthens motivation is rather obvious:
If staff cannot or will not use facts (), then they are most unlikely to be able to develop aspirations () in a realistic and effective way. Strengthening the organization's identity is and yet more demanding. It depends on innovating in ways that evolve with wider society and shape the industry.
Team Learning
Both the grasp of reality and the intensity of commitment must be:
● individual (i.e. personal or profession-based)
&
● corporate (i.e. shared or group-based).
Work in teams or groups is essential for both of these elements. Team-work should have been solidly established already: but teams till now were used to decide, discuss, inform, control, appraise, steer, debate &c. not…
● for collaborative inquiry
or
● to modify convictions.
It follows that increasingly sophisticated and dedicated managers are required: people with the humility to face situations, and the courage to act positively to realize their aspirations.
Why the Rationalist Stage is Essential
Installation of the last three inquiry-cum-motivational modes has to take for granted the solid establishment of .
Managers cannot jointly inquire and commit themselves to what they learn if they are unaware of what is important, if they do not know where they are going, and if they cannot cooperate. And learning builds upon attitudes of participation and expectations of proper communication.
Once are established, they can deepen within teams to permit ever greater collegiality, ever more meaningful dialogue, and ever greater openness.
Managerial Inquiry is not Scientific Inquiry
Effectiveness in achieving your objectives is a function of
● your grasp of reality
&
● your motivational energy.
Scientists strive to know independently of action or decision, so science can restrict itself to empirical reality and ignore motivational factors.
Managers have to know in order to do and have to feel energized and motivated. Managerial realities to be grasped in organizations include:
■
Essential facts and figures—objective reality:
which provides conviction-based energy.
■
Feelings, assumptions, aspirations—inner reality:
which provides will-based energy.
■
Identities, processes, structures, relationships—social or deep reality:
which provides a flow-based energy.
Managers must inquire and grasp reality for themselves. Assistants and external consultants may aid this process, but they cannot learn or know for them. Nor can they be energized on their behalf.
Which Mode First?
As in the case of the move from the structuralist to the dialectic stage, the next transition is relatively unproblematic and obvious.
Rationalist values lead to attractive but unverifiable statements of intent that invite challenge: e.g.
Prior to this stage, it is common for goals and decisions at higher levels to be set with remarkably little information or investigation and with only limited input from the people involved. The more challenging or distant the goal and the greater the risk in the decision, the more unsatisfactory this approach seems. People want to know: what is the objective reality? & what did actually happen?
You now appreciate the new focus for cultural development.
- Continue to with the empiricist mode.
Originally posted: 17-Jun-2011