An attitude towards something is often difficult to recognize. Often the attitude is characterized in the form of non-verbal communication. Body language. People give away their attitude by the way they sit, the way they look or avert their eyes, the way they sit with arms crossed, the way they react to events or situations, the way they behave. If an employee sits slumped in a chair,
staring more out of the window or answering his SMSs, continually sighs and nods his head from side to side, then declares “I fully support the initiatve you can count on me 100%”, you can almost guarantee that his attitude will not stimulate the desired behavior.
A research study by Professor Albert Mehrabian, a pioneer in understanding communication, into the non-verbal aspects of communication indicated that you can divide up interpersonal communication into the words we use, the tone of voice and gestures or body language. His conclusions showed that your words make up 7% of your communication, your tone of voice 38% and your body language and gestures make up 55% of your total communication.
Attitude is also evident in the things that are not said. If somebody is questioned about the current ways of working, and you know that people complain and are frustrated and the reply is “Yeah, it is OK I suppose”, it signals an attitude of ‘I’m not going to rock the boat’, or ‘if I say that it is OK I won’t have to do anything about it’. This form of passiveness can be an attitude to avoid generating additional work or additional confrontation.
For example, a manager might ask his employees for feedback on a plan and there is stillness.
People eye each other nervously of fidget in their chairs. This could signal an attitude of ‘It doesn’t matter what we say it’ll happen anyway’, or ‘This’ll never work but I’m not going to be the one to say’, or ‘I’m not going to say anything I might have to do something’. This form of passiveness could be a symptom of not wanting to accept responsibility, or of letting somebody else do all the work. If this type of attitude is not questioned, then the risk is failure, without knowing why, or being able to do anything to mitigate the risk.
It is also interesting to visit and observe the areas around coffee machines. Often there are notice boards where people hang up news clippings, quotes or cartoons. These often give a good indication of the attitudes of people. It is also here where people are more relaxed and more likely to verbalize their attitude to what they have seen or heard.
What does it say about attitude when there are numerous Dilbert cartoons about being blamed for everything that goes wrong, or articles about bad IT management?
It is worth looking at these and investigating why they are there and what the underlying cause was for putting them there; often this gives an insight into an ABC issue that the organization needs to resolve.
A very effective way of identifying people attitudes is by playing a business simulation. In a simulation people are taken out of their ‘normal’ working environment and are placed in unfamiliar, difficult situations. During the reflection moments in a simulation, the facilitator can ask questions to the team. This can often give an insight into underlying attitudes.
An example:
During a simulation the Help Desk became overloaded with work. The second line were not very busy. The staff sat with nothing to do and enjoyed the obvious suffering of their colleagues.
They didn’t make any attempt to support their colleagues and the Help Desk people didn’t take
0 ABC of ICT
the initiative to ask for help. The result of the simulation was poor. Not enough situations were resolved and resolution times were poor. During reflection the following was discovered about the underlying attitude in the organization:
- If you are struggling you don’t ask for help, you solve it yourself, asking for help is losing face.
- If you see that somebody is struggling, you don’t ask if they want help because you make them feel they cannot cope, and they will feel inferior.
During a business simulation these attitudes can be discussed in detail. If the organization wants this type of attitude and the corresponding behavior changing, then the team is stimulated in the next simulation round to ask for help or to offer help and support. At the end of the round the improvement in performance and the reduction of stress can be related to changes the team made.
Another way of discovering attitudes is to hold interviews with various stakeholders. The interviews with the different stakeholder groups often give a good insight into how people think and perceive things, and where the differences are in perceptions, opinions and attitudes.
Example:
During an interview with the customer of an IT organization, the customer said: “The IT organization needs to be more flexible. Standard services are OK for some services but we need flexibility to enable us to capitalize on business opportunities.”
An attitude can also be influenced by putting information into context. What do we mean by that? For example saying “We need to improve the service delivery to reduce costs”. The attitude of an employee hearing this can be: “What do I care about costs. It doesn’t impact me…”, in other words “Do I look like I care?”. It leaves the employee feeling neither a sense of urgency, nor
‘what is in it for me’. ‘We need to improve the service delivery to prevent us being outsourced’
has an entirely different impact on attitude.
If you can create a feeling of ‘that is why I need to change’ then this is the first step towards changing attitude.
It is important to think with the perception of the recipient in mind when communicating an improvement initiative or asking somebody to change the way they do things. Ask yourself the question: “If I was them and asked myself ‘what is in it for me?’, what would I want to hear?”
For example:
• Will it make my job easier?
• Will it give me more challenging work to do?
• Will it give me more value? Something to add to my CV?
• Will it help me develop and get a new position and more salary?
Think about this before communicating and try to explain it from the recipient’s perspective if you want to increase the chance of buy-in. Remember also in times of change people may be thinking:
• Will this take interesting work away from me?
• Will this make me less valuable?
• Does this put my job at risk?
• Will I be capable of doing this?
• Why do we need to do this, it costs effort, time and may be frustrating?
We realize that to many people this may be simple common sense and we should be embarrassed writing something so obvious in a book. But it is suprising when we ask service managers giving a presentation: “Imagine I am an employee and I ask what is in it for me?”, they say “I don’t know, let me think about that”, or “you’ll be working in a more professional organization, we’ll be more effective and efficient” – container terminology and a chance for me to play bullshit bingo.