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Speaker A Hi, I'm Herb Koplowitz. Sort of a lead in this training. We're going to start, like to welcome you all to Clinic One and to the conference. And we're going to start the evening with introductions. We're going to introduce ourselves and then you're going to introduce yourselves. Let's see.
Speaker B We have a flicker.
Speaker A Yes, we have a clicker. So my name is Herb Kapowas. I am president and sole employee of Terra Firma Management Consulting. And my first exposure to Ro was in 1978 when a mentee of my mentor said, you have to read a General Theory of Bureaucracy. Now, those of you who have had trouble with Requisite organization, you have no idea how easy you got it. And so that was back then and I've been involved ever since. So we'll just go across the table.
Speaker C I'm Nancy Lee and I first met Elliot in 1982 when he was the keynote speaker at an American Management Association conference that I was speaking at. Also. And I had been a manager in General Electric at T and Macy's. And I thought they were all not really too well managed. So I heard him speak and I thought, here's somebody who knows what they're doing, who has a total system, who's thought this through. So I read General Theory of Bureaucracy and I said nobody could read this and really learn what to do. So I did some educational material from that book and I've been doing it ever since. I've been consulting in Requisite for a number of years since then.
Speaker B I'm Paul Tremlet. I'm the titular president and founder of Core International in Canada. We've been around since about 1998. I first got involved with Requisite in about 1985 when a colleague of mine who had been working with Elliot and I was running into a client problem and he handed me The General Theory of Bureaucracy. But fortunately he said, don't try to read the whole thing.
Speaker A There's these three chapters that will help you. Just go for that. Was that George?
Speaker B That was George.
Speaker A Same guy? Yes.
Speaker B And so I read those three chapters and took it to the clients and they made a great deal of sense out of it. So I thought, there was something here. So 1985 for me, I'm Ron Cappell.
Speaker D Cappell associate, and my introduction was in the late 80s, similar to Paul and Herb in terms of George Harding being the connect point, suggesting that I read General Theory of Bureaucracy and I agree with Herb that I have no patience with people who complain about Requisite organization. General theory of bureaucracy was much different. I started reading it, it was like this. There were no pictures. And after about 30 or 40 pages I put it down. It's just too dense. I couldn't get through it. But then as I was working with organizations, things just kind of clicked. And about six to nine months later I came back and read it. And it was the best book that I had read in the field, and as with some others, had a relationship with Elliot over an extended period of time, which was quite a gift.
Speaker B Yeah, indeed.
Speaker A All right, we'd like you to introduce yourselves now. And what's the question? Name, role, organization? Where from and what intrigued you about requisite organization? Quite a group. And it seems I don't know, between us, in Canada and Australia, the Commonwealth may outnumber everyone. All right, so what are we doing here? Just give you an overview over the next few days. And I think I'll remain seated so I don't inter block the screen. We're here to reinforce your understanding of requisite, really, to provide opportunities to apply the principles. This is a working it's a working workshop, and we used to do this stuff where we would introduce the concepts in the training, and you're there sitting and taking notes, and we're trying to lecture, and you know how successful that is. And thanks to the Novus material how many of you did go through the Novus material? Okay, that was the right response. We will explain what's not clear, what wasn't clear to you, we will explain. We'll go through that. But what we want to do is take you through an exercise over the next tonight and the next two days of applying the principles, which we first did this in Calgary two years ago, and it was a tremendous success. Right. We felt very good about it, mostly.
Speaker B Because of you guys, the group that was there. It's going to be the same thing this time. I'm sure you get so much that we're just listening to you guys talk in terms of the various experiences from some in deep experiences as well as some new. I think that's going to be a really rich time for us.
Speaker A Sorry. Yeah, no, thanks. So you'll get some experience in analyzing organizations, the stuff that's in the books, you're going to actually see how do you deal with a client in this stuff? So that's what this is about. That worked. How about that? All right, so tonight introductions, as we've done tomorrow, we will go through manifest chart analysis. So you go to your client and you say, do you have an.org chart? And they pull something out of their drawer and they say, this is out of date, and he never really reported to her, but here you go. All right. And so what do you do with that piece of paper? How do you analyze that? We're going to do an analysis of that. We're going to go through how do you diagnose organizations. Tomorrow we will do a demonstration of a time span interview, which is sort of at the core of it. And it's an amazing tool, not only for diagnosing organizations, but for yourselves to learn it, those of you who are consultants and struggling around. And how do you get your first client in this? You can always do time span interviews. You can always do that as practice, and when you're doing it in real life, it's the measurement of the organization, but it's also an intervention. I think all of us, most of the times we do a time span interview, the person we're interviewing is different at the end of it, and they have some insights they didn't have before. So it's a very key skill. Could I have a volunteer who is a manager who would be willing to be interviewed by me tomorrow and have that taped and and possibly put on the website?
Speaker E I manage, but not directly people right now.
Speaker A Okay. Yeah. I'd like to have someone who is a manager. Yeah. What if it didn't have to be recorded? Because that's what happened in Calgary. I didn't ask. And then we did the whole thing and we taped it, and the guy can't you can't you can't use that. Would anyone be willing to be simply interviewed? It's not painful. Okay. Thank you. Alicia. Okay. All right. So you will get a real live demonstration tomorrow. So that gets into the topic of levels of work. How do you group work? And assessing the extant structure. Right. So what you were sent was what gets pulled out of the drawer? Someone does a whole lot of time span interviews, and then you get here's what it is, where the height of a role represents the time span of it and the stratum of that role. So that's what tomorrow is going to be about. Saturday we're going to check in three tier management. It's not a structural issue, but it's in the foundation of it all.
Speaker E Advance.
Speaker A Thank you. Thank you. All right, here we are. Three tier management. What are the manager management practices? Manager to subordinate. Manager once removed to subordinate once removed. Role fit. How do you make sure that the person you're putting in the role has the judgment capacity to handle the complexity of the work in that role? Developing design propositions. Right? Because you'll be working in your groups to analyze that extant structure and to come up with some recommendations of what to do differently. Implementation considerations. It's terrific to say, hey, here's the York chart we need now. How do you make that happen? What are the issues there? And what are you going to take home? Celebration and all of that. So we would like you now in small in your table groups. Think back over the did I do this right? Yes. All right. Think back to the elearning you did. What impressed you or was powerful? What bothered or confused you? And please get a spokesperson from your table. We're going to give you how long?
Speaker B 20 minutes, I think.
Speaker A 20 minutes. We said 15 minutes. Yeah. We're going to give you ten minutes. Ten minutes in the group. So speak quickly and get a spokesperson. And the spokesperson, please mention one significant issue, and for both of those questions. And when we get around to your table, if come up with a different issue and so forth, and if there's anything important left over, we'll gather that at the end. So ten minutes. It's now 19 after, let's say at 830, we'll pull back together again. So one thing that impressed the table or was powerful about the Elearning was distilling complex.
Speaker E Well, it was distilling complex. Requisite concepts into plain language.
Speaker A Okay.
Speaker D A couple of peter.
Speaker A And confusing. Confusing.
Speaker E The inner conflict between having a humanitarian point of view that people can be anything and the science of establishing levels of capability.
Speaker A Okay. A humanitarian myth. That what? That people can be anything. Okay.
Speaker C Call it anybody can be president.
Speaker A Anyone can be president of the United States. And we have seen that. All right. In the corner.
Speaker D The material builds in a logical way, and it's easy to understand.
Speaker A Okay, great.
Speaker D Different language, clinical eg subordinate.
Speaker A Yeah. Okay.
Speaker D Which is not used in the culture of one of the organizations represented at Earth.
Speaker A Okay. And we will comment on that. Yeah.
Speaker D One more thing.
Speaker A Wow. All right. You were so succinct with one person.
Speaker D Mentioned something very interesting, which was the concept of the mor. Not having one's immediate manager, being able to help a subordinate with their own development, having it relegated to the mor.
Speaker A Was that a powerful or that was confusing. Maybe a negative. Okay. Confusing. All right. Okay. Good. Stable.
Speaker D A great vehicle for thinking analytically about how to organize and how to have people report. That was a plus, by the way.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker D On the confusing is that most of the material that you were provided really didn't provide some of the content of explaining how to really apply the model. It was too much of the success.
Speaker F Stories.
Speaker D Such that it almost turned me off.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker C Okay.
Speaker A I got it. Yeah.
Speaker D Tell me how to do it.
Speaker A Okay. All right. Over here.
Speaker G On the positives, I mean, good feedback on the material of how it deals with the basics about the content itself. I mean, the sense of clarity, how you define accountabilities, how you define responsibilities, how you define a task, and also how the time span provides a clear cut for defining different organizational layers. On the confusing side, we were discussing a lot about complexity of our role, how it relates to time span and whether time span is the only measure or whether there are different measures for complexity that could be conflicting with time span.
Speaker A Okay. Thank you.
Speaker E All right. So from a powerful perspective, the concept of how a match or a mismatch of level of work and capability of an individual can create success or lack of success. And from not necessarily confusing, but more of, like, a firm, it would be interesting to talk about that in more in depth. Then there was a salary structure that was aligning levels to salary bands by using an X measure. So for those that have a little bit of background in compensation.
Speaker A We found that interesting.
Speaker E And another one to add there maybe a little bit further discussion around what we mean by value the work. What sustainability scale?
Speaker A Good. Great. Any other burning issues missing? Cool. We'll have two days. Let's take a look at that. What was it? The conflict now? Okay. Are you saying that the conflict between Ro and the reality or the belief that we all have infinite potential? The belief which happens inside the client organization is that you have to watch.
Speaker D When you establish castes, almost like you look at historic empire have these types of things, and there's always going to be a small percentage. But I think it was well explained at our table is that it can be a detriment if it's brought on too early and it's an implementation rollout too.
Speaker A Sorry? If what's brought on too early?
Speaker D If the level identification people, it has to be you explained it much better than I did. We just made a point that you do have to be cautious when you introduce the idea because you generally will have that resistance to that idea. And in some organizations, if it's not introduced carefully, it does backfire.
Speaker A Yes. It also can backfire in organizations that are accepting it, and you get into stratum snobbery. So this is probably the most delicate topic, I think, in all of this.
Speaker E Can I add something to that? Because for us, it's something like.
Speaker C We.
Speaker E Talked a lot about with our employees creating careers at the bank, staying with us. We're lucky that we have very long tenure, but things are changing rapidly, and we want the people that are talented to stay with us. The reality is that while we sell that message that build your career here, keep moving, go across, we have great opportunities there's, people that are not going to have the capability for those jobs. And we struggle a lot with how to conciliate that because there's going to be people that are going to want to manage. Maybe that's their dream, and maybe they take classes, maybe they keep trying, they keep interviewing for it. Maybe they're not a good fit. So how do you have that message with that particular individual more broadly, to.
Speaker A Say, yeah, I believe one of the unrecognized challenges in bringing Requisite in, we talk about what has to be learned. It's a model, it has skills. There are facts. The challenging part is what has to be unlearned. Be interested in your comments. My approach on this is always to say to bring their own experiences into it. Right. And this is easier with managers than with their subordinates. But do you really believe that each person you manage has as much potential as they can? I mean, let's get real about it. My issue for me, the crisis was in the first time I met Elliot and I raised this very issue with him. He says, well, what do you mean, egalitarian? I said, well, that anyone with enough effort and opportunity can accomplish anything. Said so do you really believe with enough effort and opportunity, anyone can do what Einstein did? Anyone could do what Mozart did. And I knew that I hadn't done anything like develop the theory of relativity when I was 25. It wasn't because of lack of effort or opportunity. Right. And it's to find the counterexamples that's some of the stuff I work with.
Speaker B And we've got the two pieces in the workshop, I think, that are relevant here is the whole three tier construct and really talking through what that means around this very issue. And then the section we put in there on the Human Capability assessment piece, I think there'll be a chance for more rich discussion about these issues on those two sections.
Speaker C Yeah, I'd like just so I can make a point, I've had this problem over and over for many years, and I found a way to kind of address it that's fairly easy up front. Whenever I start to teach the education about requisite organization, I'd say, would you not agree that tasks or assignments differ in their difficulty? If so factor you have to agree with that. Then would you not agree that people that are working for you because I'm teaching managers, the people who are working for you at any given time differ in their ability to do those differing tasks? Once you get agreement on those two issues, you can work everything from that. That's how I've solved that issue.
Speaker A The other thing I want to say about it, this is talked about in organizations, but generally not actually acted on or believed. So the biggest challenge I had in this was working with probably the best school board in Canada. School boards are not the kinds of places that feel comfortable with the notion that capability is limited in people they really want to. Right. But the superintendents, who are the stratum five roles subordinate to the director at six, talk around which of the elementary school principals stratum three role are ready to become high school principals stratum four role? Right. That notion of readiness, have they matured to it? They operate on that. They depend on it, while saying everyone has equal potential, in a sense, like you said, catch them in their own eye early on, but gently.
Speaker H But I think we must just acknowledge, though, that this goes against the basic things that we teach our children.
Speaker A Yes.
Speaker H That you can leave anything you want.
Speaker A That's right.
Speaker H So we lay the seeds, we plant the seeds of this thought for 2025 years, and suddenly you get into a job that tells you, hey, that's not going to happen.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker H So we must understand the trauma that that individual goes through in a country like South Africa, where we come out of a new generation entering the business world. Suddenly I can become a manager and somebody the hell is going to tell me that I cannot be the CEO of this business? That's just not going to happen. And all the other legacy stuff enters the room as well. So it is an emotional conversation. It will always remain emotional conversation. It's never going to be easy. So one must face a fact like that and deal with it with kids glove until somebody gets comfortable and can breathe through it and can deal with the issues and then relax around it. One shouldn't skid it and try and avoid it.
Speaker D If I could add, I think one of the differences with this is that it has more precision around levels. If you look at other methods, the precision is not there. You go into an organization and get a comment like, we don't want to have hierarchy, and you say, well, just a minute. Now, does everyone get paid the same in your organization? No. Are the job titles all the same in your organization?
Speaker A No.
Speaker D Do some people report to other people in your organization?
Speaker A Yes.
Speaker D Well, let's be clear. You've got hierarchy. The only difference is that there is a clarity and a precision here, and there's some tools to help you be more specific, but it's not a question of whether you have it or not. You already have it. Is there a hierarchy in Leaky? I'm sorry?
Speaker F Take a look at the emerging, changing.
Speaker D World of network organizations and Wiki type organizations. Is there a hierarchy there? Will there continue to be the same type of hierarchy as we look at hierarchy in the traditional, centralized, decentralized, matrix federated type of organizations? So my comment would be that if you look at employment hierarchies and we still have employment hierarchies, look at employment hierarchies, and you look at complexity of work, that doesn't change so much. You look at individual capability, that doesn't change so much. What is different, I think, is that there are more lateral arrangements that are possible. However, my experience has been that if you ignore those in terms of the networked or outsourcing or whatever, you pay a price for it. So I've seen a number of organizations in It areas who have outsourced work well. They weren't clear about the difference between stratum one procedural work and stratum two diagnostic work.
Speaker F Let me finish, please.
Speaker D They weren't clear about the positions. They weren't clear about the capabilities. They ended up getting proceduralized work that did not meet their requirements. So even in that outsourcing type situation, that information and that specification would have been quite useful. Yeah, I can clearly see how this would be effective for consulting companies and service providers in recognizing if this engagement is appropriate for them or not appropriate for them, and who in the organization would be appropriate to interface with client. I'm looking beyond just outsourcing because I see it working with outsourcing. I even see it as a great vehicle for helping hire and trying to identify. I'm looking to hire a candidate. This is really a structured approach to thinking that skills I'm looking to hire. I'm trying to look at the future and the world evolving towards, again, a much more virtual weekly style environment where you're not even going to know some of the people out there that are working for you.
Speaker A Okay? I don't think that's a topic we're here in this group to deal with. It's an important topic and it's worth, I think, having lunch over and sort of organizing things. But it's not something I don't think we can deal with the future of hierarchy and all that.
Speaker B One thing I would say, if I may do it in a conversation with Elliot, is I think he cautioned us one time we were looking at working for a large Canadian law practice in Canada, which theoretically is a partnership. And his caution to us was be careful because he would argue that some of these large service provider firms, for example, in the world, the word he used was they're Novas. Nobody's actually gone in and studied them like we did way back with Glacier in terms of what are the fundamental properties of this particular type of system, which was a hierarchical system of accountability. And I think what he was saying is that maybe those systems are changing away from some of that and they're novice and that we'd really have to research them rather than just laying this stuff on them. So I think the Wikis and perhaps the Googles and some of those kind of things, although a friend of mine got some contact with Google and found out that, yeah, well, they have all this neat stuff and everybody's doing all this kind of neat interactive stuff. There's somebody in the organization who's being held accountable for how effective that all that good stuff is going on down there with the tables and all those kind of games. So we have to be careful. I think what we're dealing with, I think, in this session is looking at the fact that at least in North America, and I suspect in other parts of the world too, is that a very high percentage of human beings live and work in the systems that we're talking about here, which are called accountability. Hierarchies in the classic sense that we understand that. So it's all the question of back in the late 80s, early ninety s, I always had the impression that the general comment was hierarchy is bad and we ought not to have any, as opposed to there's bad hierarchy and we should try to fix it. So what we're talking about here is taking a look at an organization that might have some bad hierarchy and figuring out how we could fix it, which would have lots of benefits relative both what it means for the organization and.
Speaker A What it means for people in it. There's a similar to some of these comments. There's a similarity to the second issue about terms like subordinate, which went over real big in school boards, and there's a real value and requisite organization placed on descriptive language. And as Elliot would say, your report doesn't necessarily give you reports, but may give reports to other people, whereas the subordinate is an order below subordinate. Now that descriptiveness. I find a lot of value in it. On the other hand, words have different connotations in the field of management. We know the connotation of words before we know the denotation. We know managers are bad and leaders are good, but we can't tell you what either word means. So I take that point about the word being clinical, and certainly to me that's not the battle to fight. But I don't know if you have a different point of view on that.
Speaker C Well, what I do, because I was so trained by Elliot's very specific language, and I noticed in the work that we were doing here together that sometimes it says subordinate once removed, and sometimes it says employee once removed. Well, what I've done, because nobody likes the word subordinate. But if you explain up front that there is no other word in the English language for subordinate, and that every employee in an organization is subordinate to someone, including the CEO who's subordinate to the board, it gets rid of some of the emotional baggage because we're trying to be scientific and very clear. So that's the way I handle it. It's not easy. And I think we found in Spanish, if I'm not wrong, elliot was very clear in his definition between accountability and responsibility. And in Spanish you have a real problem. Am I right with that? And translating requisite into Spanish, so it isn't always clear, and you have to sort it in different languages. I'm sure that subordinate issue is different in different languages, too, because some of the work we're doing is just being translated into Russian right now. And I'm sure there's going to be other issues.
Speaker A When I did training in India, subordinate, terrific hierarchy, of course. Give my manager my best advice. Not on this.
Speaker E Question, on that subject of subordinate. Do you guys find any fault then in knowing the connotation, the history that certain words might have within an organization to replace it with a different one, knowing that I know that I'm talking about subordinate, but I'm going to call it employees, not to make them feel uncomfortable. Do you guys want any fault with that?
Speaker C I go along with what the organization is comfortable with as long as it's very clearly defined. I mean, I find the word judge. I mean, Ellie always used the word to judge because it's a matter of our judgment. The word gets translated into assess. Assess has all different meanings. But most organizations I'm in want to use assess. So if they want to use assess and it means judge and we know what's going on, we use assess often you have to do that.
Speaker D A comment I would have is that over time we've developed an approach that's very true to what I think is the core of Ro in terms of time span and information processing capability. Because I think both of those are scientifically based and there's lots of research that we've done and other people have done, but we've modified some things in it. So we don't use the word subordinate, we use the word direct report. But one of the things we do is that any word we use we operationally define. We've got a glossary of words, definitions of all the words, and I think that's a real key that there'd be operational definition. So that one actually does know what the meaning of the word is.
Speaker A I'd like to move on. The Mor issue was the thing about getting guidance from your manager and getting guidance from your manager once removed? Was that the confusing thing? I wasn't sure.
Speaker C No, I know what it is. Okay, we'll deal with it.
Speaker A We'll deal with it later. Okay. All right. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. It will be dealt with.
Speaker C All right, no problem.
Speaker A No worries. Okay. All right. And the next one was below that not enough how to not enough how to okay.
Speaker B It's what we're here to do.
Speaker A But maybe there could be more in the pre material. Is time span the only measure? Depends on who you ask. Right? And I think all of us here consider it to be the core of it. And when I'm assessing a role, I want time span. I also want to know what processes does the person need to work with information in their role? I also want to know what roles do they want work with? Because typically you can be a thought partner best with someone within one stratum of yourself. And another measure that my colleagues use, which I haven't, but I think I better start doing it, is pay compensation. And what you want is for all of those to align. But the science of it really is about time span.
Speaker C Well, the others are indicators. They give you a little indication. And where Moni worked, we had to do 5000 people in a very short compressed time. You couldn't time span but a certain amount of the roles. And so we had to look for other indicators to get the work done within the time that it had to be done or they were going to shut the plant down with the reactors. Sometimes you have other problems to deal with.
Speaker D Pablo, one issue that appeared here is that, for example, you measure the size of the role and the time span. But the feeling is that sometimes that task is not the most complex of the role.
Speaker A Right.
Speaker D That appears to be some sort of contradiction.
Speaker A That was the discussion. The issue is, if you are my manager, how long will you allow me to. Work marginally below your standard before you would find out that's really what this is about. And there are connections between that and other things that I haven't been able to figure out. But the reason why we talk about the length of the longest task is, as I'm writing this report for you, we have coaching conversations. You know, if I'm wildly off, but you don't know if I gave you just the report you want until I plop it on your desk and you can read it. So the issue isn't the complexity, it's how long do you allow me to work on my own judgment that I'm meeting your standard? And that's where that comes in. I think you'll get a sense of this when we do it tomorrow in the time span interview. Yeah.
Speaker F The way I found it most useful to explain to people is timespan is the only true measuring instrument in that there is a direct correlation. But timestampan does nothing to explain why the complexity is there. As Herb said, we don't know the answer to that. What traditional job grading roles, job grading processes do, is they start to pick up on the variables that may contribute to the complexity, but that's not the same as measuring it. And so the way to think about it is this is the only measurement instrument. But as Nancy was saying, at the end of the day, managers don't give a hoot about time span. They need to learn about what is the work and how complex is the work, and at the end of the day, that's what they really need to come up with. But the time span helps you find those benchmarking roles, so you can have those conversations about ten times as many roles.
Speaker A Right. Okay. We're not going to quite finish at nine, but I want to get as close as we can. The issue about aligning compensation to levels. What was the.
Speaker H It was just interesting thinking about the fact because normal grading models, there's a science of measuring roles in a certain way to get your grading model. And some of them have got differentiated grading models that different types of capability, an It capability or an investment banking capability might have different grading models attached to that. And here we come, and we say, okay, at the top end of two, bottom end of three, there's an X co X times eight, level one, X times 00:33. And there you go. There we start. And it was just a very interesting way to look at it, and our sense was, I have to go and test this.
Speaker A Yeah, okay. Sorry.
Speaker B Well, we're just about finished.
Speaker A Okay. Thank you. Sometimes I feel that way too. But yeah, it could be could be me. Yeah. Just not as powerful as I used to.
Speaker G Okay, one comment about open station. I don't know if it's going to be the time to discuss that during the sessions, but try to understand a little bit from you guys what has been your experience when trying to define fixed and variable compensation under the requisite organization?
Speaker A Yeah, I have not worked with that.
Speaker G Current practice in many sectors which has been going towards more and more variable compensation based on performance.
Speaker C Well, Elliot was very clear about the fact that you could determine felt fair compensation and that there's a relativity of the compensation and that that is what's appropriate. And what I find in going into organizations is they want to jump into compensation very soon, very early, and it absolutely should not be touched until the level of work of roles is pretty well established. The appropriate people who can do the work of the role are in the roles. You've gotten rid of as much compression as possible. It is absolutely the last thing to deal with because most organizations have had their grading system drive their compensation, which had very little to do with the complexity of the work. So the change in compensation is really some of the biggest and grading and titling which go along with it are some of the biggest and most traumatic pieces of requisite organization change. So the other has to be accepted and the organization's way of dealing. And the organization's changed culture before you deal with compensation.
Speaker A Okay, the last point valuing the work, to me at least, means I enjoy doing this work. I get pleasure from doing it. And I mean, that's important because if you put me in a role where I have to go out and meet with people and convince as an introvert, I'm going to shrivel, I come back. I'm not looking forward to it. You're my manager. You're going to have to hold me accountable a whole lot for that. So what's really useful is I get up every day really wanting to do the work that's in my role and I'll put up with some other stuff I don't like. But that to me is what valuing the work in the role is that I'm attracted to doing that work.
Speaker C This is another loaded piece of this whole work that requires some acceptance. And even Elliot changed his language and the last time he rewrote requisite organization. And he didn't call it values, he called it required behaviors.
Speaker A I have a lot of trouble with separate. Those are separate?
Speaker C No, if you look, it's required behavior. And if you use required behavior, then it opens the door for competencies in too many organizations. In an organization I'm working with right now, they have said accepts requirements of the role, which is a bit different and maybe closer. But it's an emotional thing about values. Just like the word subordinate is an emotional thing. So it's what works in an organization. I think there are many good ways to approach requisite. There are a few things that are.
Speaker B Totally antirequisite and we do have a section on fit to roll. And so I think again, I would say that I think our experiences in this room and more conversation about that can fit into that particular section of our time together.
Speaker A So I want to just really briefly go over some myths and hiccups. There are some things in requisite that are absolutely straightforward and there are predictable ways of misunderstanding them. Right. And there are things that people catch on. So that's why we thought it would be important to say that people and this is to your point before that hierarchy is bad and it's unnecessary. Right. And what our point is that predominantly, and there may be new forms coming, but predominantly organizations need hierarchy. It is the best way to be effective. Efficient and build trust. But do it right. And this is how to do it right. We've talked about this, the belief we're all born with the same potential. Another that requisite requires you to act in ways that destroy trust. That the fear that a manager has, that if they hold a subordinate accountable or fire deselect a subordinate, that they'll be sitting alone at the Christmas party, no one is going to trust them anymore because they've been so hard on people, as opposed to the experience, which is everyone goes around and says, it's about time you did that. We've been depending on that person and then we haven't found them dependable. So the trust issue, the notion management is bad, leadership is good by people who don't define either term. I had someone once go through a year of Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review, by the way, to look at how many times was the word manager used? How many times was it defined leader work? And I think manager was the top one. And it was used about I think it was 121 articles, never defined. Actually, none of the terms were defined. And so when you talk about what a manager is or what a leader is, this is why you're talking about giving operational definitions and so forth. This stuff is important. It yeah, I certainly started off thinking that people just needed to learn new beliefs and acquire new behaviors. And the hard part is having them unlearn the beliefs that they have. That, to me, is a major part of the work in implementing Ro.
Speaker B I suppose some of the folks from Latin America may have read Harold Solas, read a nice paper, and I don't know if you've seen it or not know why is Ro so hard to understand? And a lot of what he talks about is that a lot of people look at it and they say, well, it makes a lot of common sense. Or we already have that. All right. But what I think Harold was trying to say is there's some really delicate distinctions in some of this work that sometimes don't get made. And you kind of have to dig deep and get under the COVID and make those distinctions to really grab some of this stuff and really see how different it is and somewhat more powerful it is than some of the things that we think from a common vocabulary that we think we can use and understand and everybody understands it kind of thing.
Speaker A Okay point I was sort of making before about simple things that are misunderstood. You define time span as the intended length of the longest task within the role. And then someone will say, oh, 95% of what I do is within under a week, so I must have a stratum one role. If you go back to the definition, if 95% of your time is on that, but there is an 18 month task you're accountable for, you're now at mid three. So it's just keeping to those definitions. And as you're working with people being sensitive to the misunderstandings that they're going to have of what you have just articulated very clearly. Yeah. The notion if a manager is accountable for subordinates output, the subordinate isn't actually accountable for anything. And I think you'll be getting into what the subordinate is accountable for. Yes, it's insulting to refer to someone as a subordinate. So all of that stuff, there's lots of this that there's as much unlearning as learning in this. So for tomorrow, tonight before tomorrow, please review the case study and be ready to talk about your thoughts in your groups tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to dig into the work. Okay. Starting at 830. Starting at 830 in this room.