{"id":825,"date":"2011-06-04T09:25:49","date_gmt":"2011-06-04T09:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saasoft.com\/blog\/?p=825"},"modified":"2011-06-04T09:25:49","modified_gmt":"2011-06-04T09:25:49","slug":"where-is-the-rotten-egg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/?p=825","title":{"rendered":"Where is the Rotten Egg?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Have you ever had the experience of arriving home from a holiday – opening the front door and being hit with the rancid smell of something that has gone rotten while you were away.<\/p>\n

Phwooorrrarghhh!<\/em><\/p>\n

When that happens we open the windows to let the fresh-air blow the smelly pong out and we go in search of the offending source of the horrible whiff. Somewhere we know we will find the “rotten egg” and we know\u00a0we need to remove it\u00a0because it is now beyond repair.<\/p>\n

What happened here is that our usual,\u00a0regular habit of keeping\u00a0our house clean was interrupted and that allowed time for something to go rotten and to create a nasty stink. It may also have caused other things to go rotten too – decay\u00a0 spreads. Usually we maintain an olfactory vigilance to pick up the first whiff of a problem and we act before the rot sets in – but this only works\u00a0if we know what fresh air smells like,\u00a0if we remove\u00a0the peg from\u00a0our nose, and if we have the courage to remove all of the\u00a0rot.\u00a0Permfuing the pig is not\u00a0an effective long term strategy.<\/p>\n

The rotten egg metaphor applies to organisations.\u00a0The smell we are on the alert for\u00a0is the\u00a0rancid odour of a sour relationship, the signal we sense\u00a0is the dissonance\u00a0of misery,\u00a0and the behaviours we look for are those that erode trust. These behaviours have a name – they are called discounts – and they come in two types.<\/p>\n

Type\u00a01 discounts are our\u00a0deliberate actions that\u00a0lead to erosion of trust – actions like interrupting, gossiping, blaming,\u00a0manipulation,\u00a0disrespect, intimidation, and\u00a0bullying.<\/p>\n

Type 2 discounts are the actions that we deliberately omit to do that also cause erosion of trust – like not<\/strong> asking for and not<\/strong> offering feedback, like not<\/strong> sharing data, information and knowledge, like not<\/strong> asking for help, like not<\/strong> saying thank you, like not<\/strong> challenging assumptions, like not<\/strong> speaking out when we feel things are not right, like not<\/strong> getting the elephant out in the room. These two types of discounts are endemic in all organisations\u00a0and\u00a0the Type 2 discounts are\u00a0the more difficult to see because it was what we didn\u2019t do that led to the rot. We must all maintain constant vigilance to sniff out the first whiff of misery and to act immediately and effectively to sustain a pong-free organisational atmosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever had the experience of arriving home from a holiday – opening the front door and being hit with the rancid smell of something that has gone rotten while you were away. Phwooorrrarghhh! When that happens we open the windows to let the fresh-air blow the smelly pong out and we go in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Where is the Rotten Egg?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,41,42,43,47,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","category-stories","category-how","category-why","category-transactional-analysis","category-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}