Congruence - the four quadrants in organisations

Much of my coaching to date has exposed the personal ‘angst created when personal and organizational values are no longer aligned. This was the reason I first enrolled on an executive coaching course, and which took me the next six months to work out how to manage effectively, through this outlet called coaching.  

	INNER	OUTER
INDIVIDUAL	SENSE OF PURPOSE / MEANING ASPIRATIONS DESIRES ATTITUDES BELIEFS PERSONAL VALUES	GOALS PLANS SKILLS BEHAVIOURS
ORGANISATION	MISSION ORGANISATIONAL BELIEFS / CULTURE CORPORATE MINDSET	VISION ORGANISATIONAL GOALS STRATEGY BEHAVIOURAL NORMS CODE OF CONDUCT PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The four quadrants were first developed by Ken Wiber in A Brief History of Everything, and have been developed by Downey (Effective Coaching, 2003).

• The upper left concerns the inner life of the individual, his/her personal values, beliefs and needs. 
• The upper right is the way in which these are expressed externally: their goals, plans, skills and how they behave. 
• The lower left concerns the inner life of the organization: its mission, culture, values – what is seen as possible and not possible.
• The lower right is the external representation of the lower left: the organisation’s vision, goals and strategies, collective behavioural norms, code of conduct. It also embraces the systems that facilitate the management of the organization.

In healthy organizations there is congruence between the quadrants: between the lower left and lower right, the lower left and upper right and, importantly for coaching, between the lower left and upper left.   

Downey suggests that ‘the biggest reason why values fail to take root in most organizations is the schism between the lower left and the upper left: between what an individual’s personal values are and the expressed values of the organization. This occurs in two ways.  

• The leadership group that generated the values was not creating them for themselves but for everyone else, so of course they don’t ‘walk the talk’.
• Secondly, for the majority of the staff the values are imposed upon them and bear little or no relation to what the individual’s values actually are; a failure to align the personal with the organizational prevents the values from coming to life.’

Where an individual feels obliged to hide his/her inner values and beliefs in the external world of organizational life I would argue they cannot be fully engaged and committed to the organization they work within. Their personal strategy is usually survival rather than development and growth.  They may seek to demonstrate externally through their behaviours how 'on board' they are. They may seek to align their personal beliefs and needs outside work. By definition though, they are unlikely to be wholly committed to the organization as they experience it.  This is may be visible through depression and burn out at its most extreme, to denial, pretence and semi-engagement as a standard work strategy at the other. Individuals often internalize the situation, blaming themselves for not adapting better to something which, fundamentally, they cannot adapt to without compromising their ‘essential’ selves.

Clearly not all coaching within organizations is about values and congruency but where these are important they cannot be ignored. 

Coaching  offers the opportunity for personal honesty.  The player is encouraged to put all his/her cards on the table and to examine them close up from a less emotional place. They often discover that the hand they thought they had been dealt is not stacked and there are other personal wild cards that have been put on one side and overlooked.

First conversations are usually highly practical and factual and appear to make rapid progress.  Next issues are usually those concerning self-perception, self-confidence and managing relationships. And under all these are values. Where misaligned values are involved I would argue these need to be examined. 

The organizational quadrants allows players to understand better why they may be feeling in this ‘stuck place,’ and that this is an area that they cannot fundamentally change but may need to adopt new strategies. There can be no blame. Their own values are not wrong or bad, simply misaligned with the values in use (to parallel Argyris and Schon's theory) they are experiencing around them. How they choose to manage this is their personal choice.  Rather than feeling a victim of the situation they can regain control through their choice of action, or inaction if this is now their choice.

The Good Work Project offers a useful Value Sort Activity that allows you to prioritise and review your own values and reflect on how these might overlap with, or differ from, others.