Interview with Dr. Zoltan Buzady Part 1/II
Associate Professor of Management, Corvinus Business School, Hungary
Director of the ‘Leadership & Flow Global Research Network’, Aleas Sims Inc., USA
Published in BUSINESS & PSYCHOLOGY* – Special Issue on Flow & Leadership
Dr. Zoltan Buzady kick-starts our interview right away with this story of his:
“During a leadership development training I deliverd at the subsidiary unit of the world’s largest water and gas pump manufacturer the following, rather noteworthy, incidence occurred:
One of their blue-collar workers, passionate about photography, always wanted to take pictures, even during his work time, at the company premises. However, was not allowed by corporate policy.
But then, during one of my Flow-Leadership trainings this person’s direct line manager has learned about the concept of Flow. I pationately explained him how beneficial Flow is to worker motivation and that Flow is coming about when we can combine our personal interests with a matching level of required abilities.
By consequence, this line manager decided to try out an experiment: he asked this line worker to prepare a short and but engaging photo report about his work and show in photo-documentary how his fellow team members help him to produce the best pumps in the world.
This photo documentary then got published in their internal corporate newspaper. All of their management and employees read it with great enthusiams.
Now the essence of my story:
the real positve effect of having created this new, Flow-promoting work environment was a much more fundamental result: This simingly totally unimportant, but new opportunity has changed this particular blue-collar worker. He became so content and happy of his workplace, that from then on he was much more interested in making an important impact on the productivity bottom line too!
Whenever he was asked to perform more complex task, he knew it is an opportunity for him to use and to develop a new set of work-related skills – which allowed him to express his true, full set of abilities within the existing company context.This particular manager-participant on my Flow-Leadership Development with #FLIGBY training reported to me also that soon the overall performance on that particular assembly section had also improved significantly!
I find this is such a positive and powerful story, as it perfectly describes how our concept of ‘Flow-promoting Leadership’ can have a significant impact to performance without any additional financial costs involved!”
Zoltan tells me, that this is his favourite of many similarly powerful and dynamic stories because it gives immediately the key understanding of how useful the theory of Flow actually can be also to business and to general management practice.
We are meeting with the professor in an exclusive, yet very authentic downtown tea house, which the global Flow-Leadership expert has co-founded and created in Budapest, Hungary, almost 25 years ago. What another great surprise!
We have asked him for an interview to share his insights and predictions about what are the most recent trends and challenges ahead which companies – in the Central-European region as well as in other parts of the world – will have to face. But no need to interrogate him twice on this topic, as his enthusiasm captures us immediately:
– Just look around here! – he encourages us –
The teaboys who work here, – now the third generation since our foundation -, well, all of them want to stay with us ‘untill eternity’. Actually, they themselves now train the next generations how to serve all these different types of teas, how to become a real expert in tasting and selecting only the best. In fact they become a real ‘tea-masters’.
Because of their expertise they have a say how the teahouse should be decorated, what music to play and how to run the business even better!
– Yeah, but I think all this cannot be achieved from one day to another! (Reporter)
Zoltan confirms:
– I never claimed that the Flow-Leadership method is the fastest method, but it is the best possible, the most profound and interesting to all those involved.
Funny that you too, immediately suggest this aspect, because this is what the we have to change in the mentality of most of the top-managers also. In fact, this is what I also experience in the wider Central European region, but also in Central Asia, where I am teaching the highest level of business elites:
Most of these people cannot or do not want to think ahead more than a year or two. Planning and working for the future beyond this horizon is totally impossible to them. The best they can do is just nodding, and saying with some sadness: ‘yes, yes, surely there is a point in longer term, but I am simply not capable to lead my organization in that way.’They do neither trust their organization, nor do they believe in their own leadership skills, nor have faith in themselves – to vision on the longer run.
But here is already the new generation of business leaders growing up!
Unlike their parents’ generation, they do not need to focus on securing their existential, financial, domestic needs, so they can focus on developing their own professional skills and are searching for new opportunities.
Constantly they are seeking out new challenges and cooperations. They easily leave those companies which cannot sketch out a longer-term career trajectory to them.
No vision, No Flow – thus: not my company, they say.
They want to enjoy life, to see new approaches and they need the see the broader perspective where they will be developing into over the years to come.So if you are such a more traditional manager, you have to ‘catch’ their energy. How? Well, by offering them new development possibilties, in the language of Flow-Leadership we call this “give them more opportunity to act.”
This phrase, explains Zoltan, he learnt straight from his colleague and friend, Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Founder of Positive Psychology and who actually also coined the term ‘To be in Flow’. To have the more and more opportunities to act is essentially what the Flow-scientists would call simply “Challenge – or higher Challenge Level”.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI FLIGBY 
FLIGBY