Collaboration between internal and external resources

Dick Richards

This article was first published in Building Learning Capacity Through Outsourcing. J. Phillips and M. Anderson (eds), published by American Society for Training and Development.

It is the second morning of a five day long training event. I am crossing the sunlit lobby of the hotel that provides the setting for the training, a hotel on the island nation of Malta. Seven of the two dozen participants in the training event are standing together in the center of the spare but elegant room. They are an Italian woman, a man and a woman from England, two Belgian men, a woman from Holland, and an American woman. They are not speaking, but simply standing in a ragged circle, and looking very anxious.

They are mid-level managers in the European division of an American company. The senior executive of the division has conceived and communicated a new vision for his organization - a vision that speaks of improved customer service, the need to keep pace with a rapidly changing business environment, and urgency to have the company’s managers enact the required changes within the organization.

The company is old and venerable one: it symbolizes stability and constancy, not change. Decisions have always been consensual - and therefore slow. Every action of any significance always has required approval by multiple layers of hierarchy, and therefore every action is painfully deliberate. Individual initiative has been unwelcome. All this must change, but managers in the company are reluctant. They have been trained to be reluctant.

During the previous day, the participants in the event engaged in activities designed to help them get to know one another. They were guided through a process of uncovering and discussing their deeply held beliefs about how things ought to be in the world, and they were sharing the circumstances of life about which they felt some passion. They formed groups on the basis of similar passions, similar ways in which they felt compelled to make a difference.
Their assignment for this day and the next is to make a difference in the local community, a difference that arises from both their shared passion and the community’s needs.

“What are you up to?” I ask of the group in the lobby.

“We are waiting for taxis,” the American woman tells me.

“We told the hotel manager about our assignment, and about our desire to help people less fortunate than we are,” says the British man. “He is sending us to a home for people who are mentally and physically handicapped.”

The American woman adds, “In case you haven’t noticed, we are all terrified. What have we gotten ourselves into?”

When the taxis arrive I fight the urge to pile in and go along with them. I want to see the next chapter of this emerging story. But I resist my urge. Those of us who are facilitating this event have decided to leave the participants to their own devices during the assignment. The remainder of our work will begin when that assignment ends, as we help them make sense of their experience, help them decide what it means for each of them as a manager in the company.

Four people, who might variously and at different times call themselves organization development consultants or training specialists, created the training program. What they have in common is a desire to create learning experiences that have a personal impact for those attending while also providing the sponsoring organization with new skills and knowledge to support a new vision. Two of the people are employees of the company. The other two, including me, are external consultants. In 20-plus years of consulting to organizations, most of the best work I have seen has been the result of such collaboration.

TWO KINDS OF BLINDNESS

Those of us who choose to work from outside organizations are too often blind to the realities of those who are employed within the company. It is easy for us to be glib about what is needed and how to achieve it. We sometimes fail to recognize or to even discount entirely the powerful forces that inhabit any organization and often serve to maintain the status quo. We can be entirely too idealistic, too attached to the possible, and oblivious to the actual.

For example, I once toiled for nearly three years as a consultant to an organization whose leaders wanted to examine the company’s closely held values, and then work to adopt new values more congruent with their marketplace. I noticed a reticence among my internal partners. The organization was a division of a larger company. Just when it seemed that the effort we were all engaged in was about to bear fruit, the parent company announced a massive reorganization, a name change for the division, and a shuffling of leaders that virtually eradicated what we had been working for. My internal partners were not surprised, of course, and this event explained their reticence. They were used to such things. I had allowed myself to be blinded by the potential of what we were doing, and did not anticipate what was on the horizon.

The inverse situation occurs when those who work within the organization are blind to their own complicity with the very attitudes and behaviors they are attempting to change. For example, I once was frustrated and angered by an internal partner who consistently failed to meet his commitments to the team of which we were both part. I then noticed that almost all of the internal people on the team also made commitments that they did not meet, or failed even to remember. When I remarked on this, after much embarrassment on their part, one thoughtful person told me, “Please understand. In this company there is a penalty for saying ‘no’ to a request. But there is rarely a penalty for saying ‘yes’ and then not delivering.”

Powerful norms such as this afflict employees whose mission is to create change. The norms often become imbedded in the very training that is intended to cure the affliction. In this example, it would have seemed appropriate to include an ending exercise about, “What I will do as a result of this training.” But in an organization in which commitments are treated cavalierly, such an exercise would be meaningless.

There are many reasons for a company to enlist outsiders to attend to the education of employees. Economy is one. The need for specialized knowledge is another. When the education is focused on creating change in the organization itself, there is another, special reason. When that is the situation, collaboration between internal people, who often can’t see the forest for the trees, and external people, who often bump into the trees while contemplating the entire forest, seems to work best. When the forest itself needs change, it is necessary to both see the trees and contemplate the forest.

Our seven intrepid participants achieved extraordinary things on behalf of the home they were going to visit. Their taxis took them to Id-Dar tal-Provvidenza, The House of Divine Providence, a remarkable place that is a model across Europe for homes of its kind. The staff at Id-Dar tal-Provvidenza made good use of the passion and energy of the seven visitors. In the two days allotted for their project, the seven painted the interior of a newly constructed bedroom wing, raised five thousand dollars for the school’s purchase of industrial washing machines, involved the home’s residents in a musical revue that was videotaped for a television fundraiser, and installed specially constructed outdoor recreation equipment. When I next saw them after the chance morning conclave in the hotel lobby, they seemed dazed to have accomplished so much in so little time.

What these people and other participants in this training event learned was that significant change arises when the deeply felt concerns of individuals are linked to a need. The rest of the event involved helping them identify needs in their organization that they could address with the same kind of passion.

Many times, while facilitating this program, I was struck by the parallels between what the participants did during their assignment, and what the four of us were doing as their staff. During one session, on Sicily, four men from a manufacturing plant in Germany spied a man roofing a building. The roofer was climbing up and down a ladder, carrying a bucket of hot tar up, returning to the ground for a refill. He had no safety equipment; no hard hat; no pulley. He seemed not to understand the simple things he might do to insure his own safety, such as tie his ladder securely. One of the four men was the safety manager of their plant in Germany. All felt strongly about worker safety.

The four German men spoke with the roofer about what they saw. Then, during the two days of their assignment, they arranged for obsolete but still useful safety equipment from their plant to be donated to the trade association to which the roofer belonged. They also gathered as many roofers as the association could muster to attend a seminar on the use of the safety equipment.

The other consultant and I, like the seven people in Malta and the four German participants in Sicily, were external resources to systems that needed help. The two other members of the training staff, like the workers at the home in Malta and the roofers in Sicily, were acting as members of the system.

The group of seven in Malta had something that the staff of the home did not have - access to the resources of a large multinational corporation. They raised the $5000 dollars by convincing the public affairs department of their company to match any donations they could acquire on Malta. The German men also had access to the same kind of corporate-based resources and were able to muster them. Both situations, however, needed collaboration with people who were within the systems and possessed the credibility to influence them. Those people also could identify needs and provide a structure to fill the needs. The staff of the home had a list of priorities, with industrial washing machines at the top. The roofer was able to introduce the Germans to his trade association and could gather people together on very short notice for a seminar.

CONDITIONS FOR COLLABORATION

All of the efforts at change described so far succeeded because three significant conditions of such collaborations were present:

With regard to the first condition, the external consultants and internal trainers, the group of seven and the staff of the home, as well as the Germans and the roofer, clearly shared common passions. The first group, both the external and internal people, truly cared about changing the organization. The second group, the seven participants and the staff of Id-Dar tal-Provvidenza, truly cared about the residents of the home. The third group, the Germans and the roofer, discovered a common bond around providing for worker safety.

As to the second condition, each of the three pairs of external/internal resources decided to attack a problem together. Their decisions to act overcame any divisions that might have existed between them. The external and internal trainers acted as equals. The group of seven, working together despite their multicultural makeup, worked in consort with the largely Maltese staff of the home. The four Germans and their Sicilian partners in the roofers association likewise came together around a solution to a problem. In each situation, common resolve to make a difference in a particular area overcame whatever personal differences might have hindered them.

The third condition was also met in all of the situations. Each of the three external/internal pairs worked together, with respect for and trust in one another, to do what needed to be done. Their relationships allowed each party in the respective endeavors to use the gifts they brought to the situation while avoiding the pitfalls inherent in their positions as either external or internal to the systems. The external and internal consultants developed enormous respect for what each brought to their common task, as well as sensitivity to what each could not bring. The group of seven and the staff of the home did the same. And the following vignette describes what happened between the German men and their roofer.

The final evening of the training program from which I have drawn the story about the roofer included a dinner attended by the facilitators and participants. During the afternoon preceding the dinner, the Germans approached me to ask, “Will it be OK if we don’t attend the group dinner?”

“Why?” I asked them.

“Because the roofer we met on the first day of our assignment has invited us to dinner at his home. He says his wife is a wonderful cook.”

They went, of course. They went because they had forged a relationship of shared passion, commitment to solving a problem, and mutual trust and respect. Such relationships ought to be celebrated properly.

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