Yesterday I undertook a workshop for an
international customer relationship team at one of my main clients. Personally, I have always had an
ambivalence about sales and business development. In my own work, my approach, which I have documented in
previous blogs, has been one of “not selling”. In this, I mentioned the story that Ram Dass tells of being
on a meditation retreat and sharing a room with someone who was vice-president
of industrial loans for a major bank in San Francisco. This individual had originally been a
vice-president of industrial loans at this bank but had given it up because the
pursuit of wealth and ambition had become unsatisfying. He had left and gone to India to seek a
guru and some form of enlightenment.
He had returned to San Francisco some years later and bumped into the
President of the bank who offered him his old job back and he decided he might
as well accept. “Was it
different?” Ram Dass asked.
The man responded that it was completely different; that before he had
been busy being a vice president of industrial loans at a bank but now he went
to work and got to hang out with these other beings and the work they did
together was industrial loans. I
meet many people who are dissatisfied with their jobs and feel that they are
not making a contribution to people and that their work has no purpose or
meaning. How can being a lawyer,
marketing director, etc. etc. contribute to humanity? Of course, ironically, this is the right question if asked
as a genuine question – how can my work contribute to humanity?
So how does this all connect to doing a
session for the Client Relationship Management team at a client? I was there running a session on
Appreciative Inquiry for the team, looking at how they could work in the
current environment to support the leaders of the business in working with
clients. I started by getting them
to look at the reality of the situation through 4 different lenses. This is adapted from a model by Tim
Galwey as below:
What Tim observed was that when we interact
with the world around us we are operating in 3 main contexts which overlap and
interact with each other. The
first is our individual world, where our internal dialogue is running all the
time, trying to make sense of the world around us (in practice there is more
going on at this individual level as it is also informed by our emotions, our
senses and our intuition. It is
only through this individual level that we are able to process changes in the
other environments or change and adapt.
The Immediate Environment is all the people we are interacting with day
to day who provide us with awareness about the world immediately around
us. The third circle is the
broader environment of all the unwritten rules, values and assumptions which
permeate the broader environment.
Since these three contexts provide information which is intangible it is
difficult for us to create accurate pictures of them and they are also
continually in flux which means that we are always updating these pictures or
at least, we need to in order to be able to relate effectively to our
environment. Tim Galwey’s point
was that the greater our awareness of these three environments the more
skillfully we are able to respond to them. It is obvious that if we are unaware of something then we
cannot respond to it. The last
sphere is Nature and this comes from an essay by Chrissy Philp where she put
forward a model similar to Galwey’s but which included this sphere of Nature
and a further sphere of Cosmos beyond Nature.
Since the sphere of Nature is already
challenging enough in a business environment I have not expanded the model to
include Cosmos thus far! For me,
the way I have interpreted this sphere of Nature is in terms of examining the
nature of life and the nature of the three other circles, ie. the nature of
organisations and cultures, the nature of other people around us and our own
nature. The more accurate our
picture of these the more effectively we are able to interact with them. There is an added dimension to the
nature part for me, which is to try and determine those deeper laws or cycles
which are not as changeable as cultural and personal phenomena. One example I tend to use is the fact
that it is in the nature of organizations and cultures to be messy and
imperfect. Once we recognise and
expect organisations and cultures to be messy and imperfect we might chose to
act to make aspects of them less messy or imperfect but we do so without the
false expectation that we can permanently affect them or change their
nature. It is the same with people
around us: once we accept their nature we are no longer attempting to mould
them into a shape we believe they should be and instead are free to work with
their nature. This is the key to
the Nature level for me; once we understand the nature of something we can work
with its nature rather than wasting our energy fighting against its nature.
And still, in typically Sagittarian style,
I haven’t got to my original point, but am still busy on tangents to fill in
the threads of the story! What was
it then that struck me at the workshop I was running for the Customer
Relationship Management team? What
struck me was that the focus on relationships in business these days,
particularly in an environment where business is tough and winning work has
taken on a greater premium, might well be part of an evolutionary shift, a
shift towards putting the individual human being first and the technical
elements of the service you are providing second. That is, that we are learning to value other people as human
beings first and then to consider the transaction we are having with them as
secondary or in service to the vehicle of the relationship or common
humanity. Thus the role of
relationship managers and sales people, is actually to help people learn to be
interested in others and put the relationship and interaction first rather than
seeing them as objects that serve our transactional commercial needs or vessels
for the fulfillment of our need to be an expert.
Whilst I recognise that, at this stage,
much of the focus on developing relationships in business is still somewhat
mechanical and self-serving, it is nevertheless an evolutionary step from the
previous focus on putting the transaction first and the relationship or human
being second.
Is it possible that we are evolving to a
point where all our interactions with each other will be closer to Ram Dass’s
room mates approach, where the various talents and practical skills that we
have are in the service of our common humanity? It puts me in mind of one of my favourite series, Star Trek,
designed by Gene Roddenberry to
act as modern parables. In Star
Trek, we get a picture of what an evolved human race could look like, where
each individual still brings their individual talents to bear and plays their
role but in the service of a common humanity and with a respect for the
humanity of each individual, and with the attitude towards alien species, a
respect for life itself.
I was even intrigued to hear a view voiced
among the Customer Relationship Management team that there had been too much
focus on profit and this had been dangerous and damaging, that the current
environment was a re-balancing, forcing individuals to respect the relationship
(and thus individual).
Could we envisage a future where everyone;
the plumber, the lawyer, the shop assistant, the car salesman meets you as a
fellow human being first and then puts their expertise in the service of that
common humanity? I think in many
instances we already do this; one has only to look at the response to disasters
such as the Tsunamis in Asia and Japan to see our ability to put our common
humanity first. Yesterday I was going through security for the Eurostar at St
Pancras and the man at security took time to smile and talk to me as a fellow
human being. The effect on my heart
and his stayed with me and passed on to others I met like a ripple in the pond
for some hours. Perhaps if we
evolve beyond money we can redefine this as “profit” a contribution to our
common human wealth – the wealth of our hearts.
Back to the CRM team and my earlier point
about how to find a job which contributes something to our common humanity. Given
the difficulty of the current environment with the pressure, fear, emphasis on
profitability, it is difficult to feel that there is any evolution; things feel
tougher and less inspiring; a return to the material realities of cost-cutting
and treating people like objects.
Yet, see this as a person challenge not to be overcome by fear and an
“everyone for themselves” survival mode and rather as an opportunity for
intense learning about ourselves and how to remain true to ourselves and
transform these negative emotions and a huge opportunity to contribute to our
common humanity and evolution appears – in fact almost the perfect one. In Star Trek, there are constant
complex and difficult challenges which look black and incapable of
solution. What I love about it is
that these challenges are transformed into deep learning which advance us as a
race (and Universe). So it is not
a question of searching for a worthwhile or valuable job but searching for how
we can transform ourselves and what we do to be of value and purpose.
To paraphrase the peerless Don Juan Mateus in the Carlos Castaneda books
“It is only when our backs are against the wall that it brings the best out of
us and personally I wouldn’t have it any other way”.
