This is a very difficult subject and I'm not sure how well this translates to the workplace sometimes. I knew someone I worked with that had a degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology who didn't seem like a serious person to me. Curious, I asked the psychotherapist I was seeing at the time what she thought. I discovered an antipathy on the part of clinical psychologists for industrial organizational psychologists that might be even more pronounced than mechanical versus electrical engineering. I gathered that she thought diagnosing one mind at a time was tricky enough without applying it to groups. In our nomenclature we would say it doesn't scale. And I also gathered that there are real ethical concerns because you can end up being a shill for corporate executives with few ethics. Sort of a dangerous combination of a Human Resources person who actually thinks they know something. Now, I know I am describing this in a biased sort of way. This is from years of working in IT and being a major Dilbert fan no doubt. But we need to recognize who we are working with and the talented practitioners that transform agents work with will have these biases too.
Generally speaking, it is my belief that transformative agents (agile coaches, leadership coaches, etc. etc.) have an outsized belief in the influence of "leaders" among experienced and talented skilled professionals. I do not envy anyone that takes up the task of trying to transform skilled and creative professional work from the top down. I don't believe that is often a roadmap for success.
Often transformation agents put a lot of effort into metrics and into facts. Skilled practitioners especially in the Information Technology space know how fungible information and data actually is. We know how fine the line is between reporting the facts as they are and also analyzing and reanalyzing the data until it creates a picture that tells the story that the purveyors wish to tell. In some cases, we have been threatened with our jobs if we don't participate in such efforts.
This is why meeting people where they are is the single most important thing that you pointed out. The difficulty though is that is very difficult to do because where individuals are in a group are frequently very far apart. The was a book once that was pretty hot. "Men are from Mars Women are from Venus". I think a great case could be made for "Software Developers are from Mars, Agile Coaches are from Saturn. And executives are from The Delta Quadrant of Star Trek fame.
Not only are individuals in a group often very far from each other, many times an individual in a group is very far from that same individual in a one-on-one setting.
Certainly, that can be true. Often times peer pressure rears its ugly head. In technical arenas often the individuals are introverted and won't interact in the same way that extraverts would find normal. There is also a type of 1984 like group-think that sometimes takes over a group or a team in which a group ethos takes on a dynamic that the separate individuals would never condone. This is how cults like Fascism form.
This is a very difficult subject and I'm not sure how well this translates to the workplace sometimes. I knew someone I worked with that had a degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology who didn't seem like a serious person to me. Curious, I asked the psychotherapist I was seeing at the time what she thought. I discovered an antipathy on the part of clinical psychologists for industrial organizational psychologists that might be even more pronounced than mechanical versus electrical engineering. I gathered that she thought diagnosing one mind at a time was tricky enough without applying it to groups. In our nomenclature we would say it doesn't scale. And I also gathered that there are real ethical concerns because you can end up being a shill for corporate executives with few ethics. Sort of a dangerous combination of a Human Resources person who actually thinks they know something. Now, I know I am describing this in a biased sort of way. This is from years of working in IT and being a major Dilbert fan no doubt. But we need to recognize who we are working with and the talented practitioners that transform agents work with will have these biases too.
Generally speaking, it is my belief that transformative agents (agile coaches, leadership coaches, etc. etc.) have an outsized belief in the influence of "leaders" among experienced and talented skilled professionals. I do not envy anyone that takes up the task of trying to transform skilled and creative professional work from the top down. I don't believe that is often a roadmap for success.
Often transformation agents put a lot of effort into metrics and into facts. Skilled practitioners especially in the Information Technology space know how fungible information and data actually is. We know how fine the line is between reporting the facts as they are and also analyzing and reanalyzing the data until it creates a picture that tells the story that the purveyors wish to tell. In some cases, we have been threatened with our jobs if we don't participate in such efforts.
This is why meeting people where they are is the single most important thing that you pointed out. The difficulty though is that is very difficult to do because where individuals are in a group are frequently very far apart. The was a book once that was pretty hot. "Men are from Mars Women are from Venus". I think a great case could be made for "Software Developers are from Mars, Agile Coaches are from Saturn. And executives are from The Delta Quadrant of Star Trek fame.
Not only are individuals in a group often very far from each other, many times an individual in a group is very far from that same individual in a one-on-one setting.
Certainly, that can be true. Often times peer pressure rears its ugly head. In technical arenas often the individuals are introverted and won't interact in the same way that extraverts would find normal. There is also a type of 1984 like group-think that sometimes takes over a group or a team in which a group ethos takes on a dynamic that the separate individuals would never condone. This is how cults like Fascism form.