Poles need "relational discipline"

There are many positive things to say about Poland: for example, the ubiquitous clean streets in Polish cities in comparison to Brussels, the city where I have my sole proprietorship. Also, I sometimes call Poland “the China of Europe,” for the relative high speed with which for instance construction works are being executed.

Consulting in a variety of company cultures across Europe, a number of things strike me about Polish organizations. In Poland, being on the economic rise, I see three patterns of behavior that I think are preventing Polish companies and the people working in them from flourishing.

1) Blame-storming: looking for circumstances or for internal or external parties to blame. Stop the blame game and brainstorm for solutions instead. I love questions like: “What can we do instead?” (Now that we know the problem and perhaps have undertaken some problem analysis), “What could a solution look like?” or “Who can do what to make progress with this?”

2) “The big nothing:” avoiding discussions that should be held with the right person, simply not answering e-mails, or gossiping negatively instead of having a discussion with the person being gossiped about. Every entrepreneur knows how much vague communication, or worse, no reply at all, can affect their day-to-day business. I prefer a clear “yes” or “no,” and even a “yes, maybe,” with enough context provided by the party I’m expecting an answer from.

3) Short-term thinking: roughly put, this is when our line of thinking is: “what’s in it for me or for our organization in the short-term?” You can see it in negotiations, where parties focus mainly on getting the lowest price, instead of weighing a number of other criteria such as long-term partnerships, transparency about working processes, actively looking together for a win-win solution. Unless you want to have a short-term (transactional) relationship with your business partners, obtaining the lowest price right now is hardly ever in the best interests of all the parties in the long-term (win-lose). In short, we need fewer transactional relationships, more structural ones.
What I think helps to overcome the above behaviors is implementing an organizational culture of relational discipline and sticking to it. By default, this will imply less top-down leadership and more co-creative and coaching leadership. Companies like Spotify, Zappos.com and Buurtzorg even go a step further and radically search for different flavors of self-steering teams and individuals.

WHAT IS ‘RELATIONAL DISCIPLINE’?

It’s a culture where all of us have the discipline to address each other directly and as quickly as needed to discuss anything critical. “Critical” can mean more or less positive feedback, even negative feedback – anything that is worthwhile discussing with one another. It implies that we don’t need planned events (e.g. team days), paralyzing stress (“this will damage our relationship”), or anyone else as a middle-man (“I’ll ask X to relay the message”), to address each other. People shouldn’t have to guess what other people’s perceptions about themselves are.

We should be applying “the-law-of-the-two-feet,” which means that you should use your judgement to decide whether you are contributing to the meeting you are participating in it, and if not – move on to a discussion or a project where you are needed. We should be able to have a direct discussion with others about what impresses, bothers or concerns us, irrespective of anyone’s rank or fear of being punished.

It’s unacceptable that we don’t say what we want to say or write what we want to write, sometimes for weeks or even months. It should be completely natural and encouraged to have real conversations with one another instead of interacting through intermediaries or indirect actions. In a culture where we talk with each other as much as possible instead of about each other, the next time you “catch” people talking about you, you’ll know that there is some sort of positive gossiping taking place about your private or public persona.
What sustainable, well-performing teams and organizational cultures have in common is that there is a widespread, high degree of relational discipline across the team and the organization. The Polish corporate landscape could benefit greatly from this type of discipline to help it flourish even more.