MC79 Context is Everything!

A theme we keep coming back to in the Management Café is the importance of context. In each situation there are many variables that influence what happens. For example the company culture, our manager, our team, the particular task and our own capability.

Sometimes we have to accept that the current context is not good one for us and we're not going to perform at our best. This can be hard to reconcile, many of us have an expectation that we can handle all challenges.

But this realisation, that the context isn't right for us, also brings opportunity. The opportunity to be patient and understanding of ourselves (or others). The opportunity to change the context. Or the opportunity to save ourselves the wasted effort and pain from trying something that will never succeed in that context.

So... how do you identify the context that works for you? And can we make progress even from the situations which don't work? Join hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti for coffee and find out!

00:15 mins In episode #74 Pilar shared a story of how a change of context, in this case working with a different team, improved her performance delivering training.

3:30 Acknowledging that the context isn't right for us can open the door to trying something different.

4:30 Tim had an experience recently with a colleague who decided that the organisational culture wasn't a good match. And so they made the decision to leave. This freed the person, and the organisation, to move forward. Pilar references Laszlo Bock's book "Work Rules" and how he incorporated this into the culture at Google. If someone wasn't performing well, then you could work with them directly but also change the context - maybe a different part of the organisation. Or maybe they were best suited to a different organisation.

6:25 Unfortunately companies and employees can sometimes misrepresent or misinterpret their preferred context during the hiring process. Ideally we'd be aware of what environments work best for us and aim for companies and roles that can accommodate us.

7:45 Things can also be quite different to how they appear on the surface. Pilar talks about a case study of a distributed company with a very flat leadership structure. However this organisation had an unofficial hierarchy and a founder dynamic that meant employees struggled to be heard.

10:00 How to identify the context that works for you? It's a big question, especially early in your career. Tim suggests that even a process of elimination, a trial and error process of identifying what doesn't work, is still good progress.

11:15 This is hard to recognise in the moment. But with hindsight we can make sense of what was or wasn't helpful to us.

12:50 We can save ourselves a lot of pain and wasted effort by understanding what will and won't succeed within our context. Pilar shares an anecdote of someone who tried to apply a productivity initiative within an organisation only to violate a cultural norm. This can be one of the big indicators that a context isn't right, when our vision of change is vastly different to the organisation's. We might need to find a new place to work!

16:20 Tim remembers a time when he badly misread the culture of his workplace because his manager had done such a great job of shielding him. A painful lesson which resulted in him being out of a job within 6 weeks of his manager leaving.

17:30 Nini Fritz of The Work Happiness Project shared something that helps her identify when it's worth applying efforts to bring about organisational change. When we see people share our desire for the outcome but they are struggling with implementation, we have the best chance to improve the context.

What about you, dear listener? Is this something you think about? How can you tell when the context is right or wrong for you? We'd love to hear from you!
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