Why some leaders are failing
 

“Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.” (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)

While many of today’s leaders have lost their way due to egregious moral and ethical missteps, just as many are facing a dead end due to their inability to see the big picture. These leaders are intelligent, but, unfortunately, not wise.

Our minds work on two levels: a lower level that deals with the concrete and is rational, analytical, opinionated and busy. It is bound by time and space. We use our lower mind to make sense of our complicated and emotional world. The lower mind is the stuff of MBAs, business school and operations-focused education. It is reductionist and mechanistic: the conventional approaches to life. It’s like living in one town, knowing it completely, and never venturing outside the borders of that town. Intelligent leaders are usually engaged with their lower mind. Wisdom does not arise from this place.

The higher mind

The higher mind deals with the abstract and accesses intuition and aspiration. It connects with the impersonal and abstract realms and speaks in the language of ideas, symbols and principles. It is intuitive, and guides us to the truth. It sees the threads woven between the many aspects of life—the entire painting. That is where wisdom arises.

Wise leaders access both their lower and higher minds. Allowing the higher mind supports insights into the larger picture, while the lower mind understands the importance of focus, self-discipline and study. They consistently seek to grasp the full range of awareness, venturing outside their past maps of reality and willing to jettison their old, safe beliefs to explore the possible and the unknown. They’re open to knowing what they don’t know. Most important of all, they spend an appreciable amount of time in reflection and thoughtful consideration of experience, which leads to important insights, enhanced value and a deeper sense of awareness.

Wise leadership

Wise leadership is not just about having experiences. It is consciously learning from those experiences with curiosity, not judgment. Wisdom is about question marks, not periods. You need to understand the connection between seemingly disconnected elements to create something new. You need to be adept at recognizing patterns, spotting trends, drawing connections and discerning the big picture.

Inquiry, for the wise leader, is not about creating a future in the image of the past. It involves searching for new insights, perspectives and understanding—seeking familiarity with the unknown.

Are you seeking wisdom?

Many intelligent leaders don’t know they aren’t wise. Here are some indications to help you see where there’s room for more wisdom-making in your own approach to working life:

• You are habitually task-oriented and focused on short-term gains, rarely taking time to step back and look beyond the conventions of your industry.
• Your focus is on limiting alternatives, avoiding ambiguity and minimizing risks. You tend to back away from the challenges of the unknown.
• You are primarily a linear thinker—always rational and logical. You rarely allow allow your intuition to inform the decision-making process.
• You rely on conventional attitudes and perspectives, focus on your strengths, deny your weaknesses and rarely allow your emotions to surface.
• You prefer to see others from a purely functional perspective. You try to avoid dealing with others’ emotions or emotional well-being. Relationship building is not for you, by choice.

When we reflect and contemplate from a deeper level, when we choose to ‘go inside’ and honestly ask ourselves if our stories are true, we are using our higher mind and opening ourselves to new ways of seeing. This is the kind of wisdom that is, in my view, most likely to support us in understanding and dealing with today’s challenges. That’s why I believe using our higher minds is what can turn today’s intelligent leaders into tomorrow’s wise leaders.

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• Is your organization using its higher mind as it considers strategies to deal with future challenges?
• Do you consider your leaders to be wise? How about you? Are you a wise person? How do you know?
• What was your experience of wisdom as you were growing up? Was engaging with uncertainty and ambiguity a way of being, or were you encouraged to stay in a safe and secure mode, focused on finding a single ‘right answer’?
• Would you say you are a task-oriented person at work? How often do you take time to seriously and deeply reflect on your life’s experiences?
• How do you deal with the unknown?
• Can you envision a world at work where people are regularly encouraged to take time out for reflection and discovery?




 

Technorati Tags: wisdom, reflection, intuition, insight

Shall we stop taking silly risks, and go back to being sensible and boring again?
 

If you’re at all interested in the history of the last hundred years, you’ll be familiar with the cases where governments have done bizarre and stupid things in a crisis, usually resulting in their own downfall. From the disastrous German offensive of 1918, to the mad idea of the Georgian government to start a war with Russia last year, via—oh, I don’t know—the calamitous Argentine invasion of the Falkands/Malvinas 25 years ago, modern history is full of madcap endeavors which always seem destined to fail. What on earth, ask historians despairingly, can they possibly have thought they were doing?

The classic case is probably the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, where historians still cudgel their brains trying to understand why the Japanese could possibly have thought they could get away with attacking a country which was the largest industrial power on earth, with twice their population.

Handling risk—usually very badly

Those of you not especially interested in military history will be relieved to hear this article is about human psychology; in particular, the inability of humans to understand and process risk.

In all of the cases cited, leaders took insane risks in the hope of achieving a smashing, overwhelming success: the end of World War I on German terms, the restoration of national territory seized by the British, and so on. For the Japanese, with a week’s supply of petrol left in the country, the choice was a humiliating withdrawal from China (think an oil embargo to force the US to withdraw from Afghanistan) or a very risky attack which promised, if successful, control of as much oil as they could want and strategic mastery of large parts of Asia.

Roll the dice . . .

You can see where this is going. Human beings are basically lousy at understanding and managing risk. That’s why it can be argued that every sensible organization should try to remove risk from its day-to-day operations as far as it can—because people can’t handle it properly.

Why people make such a mess of risk

Studies have shown that we assess risk based mainly on what we hope to gain, not what we fear to lose. People go to casinos because of the small chance of becoming a millionaire, not because of the very large chance of losing all their money.

It’s no different with the fate of nations. War games in 1918 and 1941 showed that there was a large probability of failure. They also showed there was a very small chance of a smashing success. As for modern financial risk-management techniques, we had better pass over those in silence, out of respect for the dead.

Part of the problem is cultural. This year in Britain, people are celebrating (or in some cases not celebrating) the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister. Thatcher helped publicize the idea that uncontrolled risk-taking was brave and worthy; when in most cases, in fact, it’s either stupid or naïve. Businessmen who took insane risks were given the kind of honors previously reserved for polar explorers and war heroes.

More recently, the willingness to take risks with other peoples’ money was seen as worthy of high salaries and fat bonuses. (I sometimes think that “risk-taking entrepreneur” is a fancy way of saying “greedy idiot”, but I may be overly cynical.) There’s always risk in life, and many successful enterprises involve a degree of uncertainty , but sensible human beings, and sensible organizations, manage to keep it to a minimum.

A new attitude to risk

In practice, the most successful organizations, companies and economies don’t take unnecessary risks. They innovate cautiously, learning from their mistakes and seeking to do better each time. When Toyota developed the Lexus brand, they didn’t risk untold trillions of Yen on someone’s bright idea. They sent a team to California for six months to live among their target market and find out what people wanted and liked. Then they designed and built a car on that basis.

We need to re-think the culture of risk-taking. In today’s bureaucratized and corporate world, individuals rarely suffer any major damage if the risks they take lead to disaster. Heads they win, tails we lose. Risk is part of human life and is an element of taking decisions in any organization. But it needs to be got back into proportion, and minimized as far as we can. We should stop praising and rewarding people who lose all our money at the roulette table.

Technorati Tags: risk, uncertainty, decision making, leadership

(This is a guest article by Jonathan Littman, Co-Author of I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job)

When historians finally get their hands around the lost decade that wiped out our 401k’s, looted our nation’s treasury and battered our economy, they will likely arrive at a simple conclusion: Playing nice was bad for business.

The last administration sold itself as the “let’s be nice to business” school of thought. It was a philosophy that spread throughout entire industries and our greater economy.

Nice was a forced smile, a phony front for those who wanted to put one over on everyone else. Most of the seemingly nice results generated by all this nice turned out to be frauds. Those generous mortgages peddled to new home-buyers blew up into balloon payments that rendered thousands bankrupt and homeless. Wall Street was nice to investors for most of the decade, delivering fabulous returns on investments nobody understood—until the bill for the bad mortgages came due.

Bad investments had been stacked upon bad investments in this nice new financial instrument called the derivative that nobody understood until it helped to wreck our economy. The nice, regular returns offered by ‘Mr. Nice’ himself, Bernie Madoff, was a gigantic Ponzi scheme that cost investors $60 billion.

“Don’t trust the smile of the crocodile . . .”

During the orgy of niceness, those entrusted with policing the purveyors of phony nice were way too nice. The SEC and FBI were incredibly nice to thousands of scam artists who went on a financial crime spree. Accounting firms were nice to lots of companies that didn’t really earn money, or ship as many products as they said, which ended up costing lots of jobs.

It was a genuinely nice age to steal billions from everyday Americans and corporate employees.

At the pinnacle of our nationwide nice delusion, two advertising agents wrote a sugary 119-page treatise called: “The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness” It was what everyone wanted to hear. Donald Trump (a client) loved it. The book became a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller. It was in short, a very nice time for business.

How quickly the herd changes direction

Nice is now a four-letter word. Companies have been falling over themselves in trying to prove that that they are no longer suckers and anything but nice.

Top corporations that have had strong fiscal quarters, or even increases in earnings, have coolly laid off thousands of workers. Smaller firms have even boasted of record earnings—while announcing massive layoffs. Those banks handed the free lunch of our billions of tax dollars have not been very nice to individuals and businesses desperately in need of loans. Congress is on the verge of making it nearly impossible for anyone under 21—young workers and college students struggling under debt—to get a credit card.

The New Nice is Mean.

Today, thousands of corporations are marching in lockstep to prove how nice they are to their company bank account, which has the trickle down effect of being mean to the people who do the work. Firms are paying employees for four days a week but demanding that they work five. They’re slashing benefits and perks. They’re laying off men and women by the thousands.

They’re being nice about it.

Consider Microsoft, which recently put out an official e-mail from CEO Steve Balmer, announcing the firm was “Eliminating additional positions across several areas of the company. While job eliminations are always difficult, we are taking these necessary actions in response to the global economic downturn.”
See how nicely they did it! They’re only eliminating positions. No talk about firing people.

Mean is the New Nice, and just as the age of Phony Nice ruled America for nearly a decade, we are now headed for some Serious Mean.

Don’t worry. They’ll be nice about it.

Jonathan Littman is co-author, with Marc Hershon, of I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job and the business blog, IHatePeople.biz. A contributing editor at Playboy, he co-authored The Ten Faces of Innovation and The Art of Innovation. For more information please visit www.IHatePeople.biz

Technorati Tags: corporate attitudes, macho management, making money, mean bosses

Managing risk is supposed to be a key aspect of leadership. Why are most so poor at doing it?
 

Leaders and senior executives are rubbish at assessing risk. The financial crisis and economic meltdown prove it. Even top bankers, whose whole job is surely most about risk, got it so badly wrong that they not only killed the goose that was laying the golden eggs to satisfy their greed, they came perilously close to cooking everyone else’s goose as well.

Of course, leaders don’t accept how bad they are at understanding the risks they undertake. If they did, they might well be able to do something about it. Instead they do what all macho managers do to avoid admitting a weakness—they resort to mindless bravado.

This only makes matters worse. Instead of slowing down, or shying away from risks they don’t understand, they plunge ahead to show what tough guys they are. Then, when it all comes crashing down around their heads, they indulge in the other age-old custom of all bullies and egotists—blaming someone else.

You have to accept that human beings in general have a poor ability to estimate risk accurately—especially if they do it based on emotions, as most do—but that’s not an adequate excuse. Leaders are paid to manage risk. It’s one of the things they claim to be able to do better than the average Joe. If they cannot do better than anyone else, why pay them so much?

Why leaders don’t grasp risk properly

These are some of the commonest reasons why leaders get it wrong when it comes to understanding the risks that they are taking:

• They don’t grasp the laws of probability. Rather than take the time and trouble to delve into what it is, admittedly, an arcane discipline, they rely on mythology and rules of thumb. Since, however, no macho manager ever admits to not knowing anything, they either ignore all the statistics are telling them or ‘interpret’ them to match their own biases. Fire, it is said, is a good servant but a bad master. That’s even more true of statistics.
• They make decisions emotionally. How you feel about something has nothing to do with the actual likelihood that it will happen. This is the mistake gamblers make. Winning makes them feel good, so they wager more next time. Losing makes them feel angry, so they wager more and ‘double up’ to get their money back. Few stop to work out the exact possibilities of winning and losing.
• They let their egos rule. Many mergers and acquisitions come about, not from business logic, but to feed the ego of the CEO. That’s probably why 70% or so fail. Betting big on a merger makes those at the top feel important, whether or not the decision makes any sense from a business point of view. There will always be bankers and consultants eager to prove it does. Those guys make so much money from feeding the grandiosity of CEOs they can always justify anything that produces fees for them.
• They don’t understand the figures and so give too much respect to experts. The phrase ‘scientific management’ has become the curse of our time. No matter how crazy the idea, it can nearly always be sold to a boardroom full of professional leaders, provided it is wrapped up in scientific jargon and supported by sufficient tables of data. Few around the boardroom table understand any of it. They decide on whether or not they like the expert and find the presentation sufficiently entertaining. (Privately, I suspect they judge the strength of the evidence by weight. The heavier the report, the more trust they put in it.)
• They treat anecdotes as evidence. You have to put much of the blame for this failing on the media. We have become so used to news reports filled with ‘human interest stories’ instead of facts or logical argument, many people have lost the ability to see a difference between them. Management books use anecdotes, trotted out one after another, to support what the author is claiming. Stories are much more entertaining than logic or data, and a good deal of management writing today has long ago crossed the border between instruction and entertainment. Much of it should be re-shelved under ‘comic books’.

Even when leaders do try to grapple with the evidence, they still get it wrong.

The human mind, as I said, is poor at understanding probability. There are three patterns of thought which are especially effective at leading us into incorrect decisions:

• ‘The proximity effect’ bedevils our understanding of cause and effect. When two things occur closely together, in time or distance, we have a tendency to assume the one caused the other. As a result, people misunderstand what is going on and apply their efforts to dealing with things which are more or less irrelevant to what they want to achieve.
• ‘The recency effect’ describes the way that recent events appear larger and more important to us than those which happened some time ago. People who have just taken a risk and succeeded are more likely to take another one. Those who fail will hang back, even if they have an excellent record of success in the past. (This effect , by the way, explains why the small error you made yesterday erases from your boss’s mind all the good things you’ve done in the previous twelve months.)
• ‘The familiarity effect’ makes us underestimate the risks associated with something we know, and overestimate those associated with something unfamiliar. It explains why doing what we have always done feels less of a risk than change—even if it’s obvious that what we have done in the past won’t work and new ideas are necessary.

The mythology of conventional management is that a combination of statistical analysis, past experience and the pragmatic application of a handful of management models renders most business risks negligible. The reality is that conventional management’s obsession with speed, substitution of action for thought, tendency to confront uncertainty with bravado, emotional bias, and confusion of egotism with leadership, has made dealing with risk into a quagmire which has already swallowed up billions upon billions of dollars.

Ordinary humans are poor at assessing risk and usually accept it. Managers are supposed to be professionals at risk management, so deny any weakness in their approach. Yet, in recent years, most executives have been no better at handling risk that the man or woman in the street—often considerably worse. Isn’t it time to acknowledge this weakness in conventional management attitudes and put a stop to it?

Technorati Tags: risk, choice, managing risk, making decisions, emotional decisions, management myths

Are you a procrastinator . . . or are you being made to be one?

If you look at management and self-help sites on the web, procrastination is amongst the commonest topics. Either all the solutions suggested are ineffective, or it is one of life’s most intractable problems. I suspect neither of these is correct. Most of the answers given have something going for them. The reason they often don’t work is they address the symptoms, not the causes.

We can group causes of procrastination into two categories: personal and organizational. The problem with much of the available advice is it addresses the first category, while the true causes of workplace procrastination lie in the second. The organizational causes of procrastination are amongst the strongest and commonest reasons for putting things off.

By contrasting the categories, you can discover whether you are one of nature’s procrastinators, or are being forced into it by organizational defects.

Are you a procrastinator by nature?

Of the personal causes, these seem to me to stand out:

• Simple disorganization. Most of the anti-procrastination techniques being offered try to deal with this. If you know you are disorganized, read them.
• Waiting for inspiration. The answer to this is simple: just do it. However, while this seems to be a personal difficulty, it may also point to something organizational, as noted later in this article. Waiting for inspiration often means you have no idea how to do a task, so you hold off in the hope that an approach will occur to you. It rarely does.
• Belief in the magic power of deadlines. When I was at college, I had a number of friends who would never start preparing an essay or an assignment until the evening before it was due to be delivered. They honestly believed that this helped them produce a better piece of work. I can see no reason why this should be true. What I suspect is that it increased their excitement, so whatever they handed in felt as if it were the product of white-hot inspiration.
• Macho posturing. This is related to the previous item. Telling everyone that you completed your assignment at 4 a.m. suggests greater machismo than admitting you prepared it carefully and had it ready several days beforehand.
• Laziness. If the reason you aren’t doing something is that you’re lazy, no amount of anti-procrastination technique is going to help you. It’s impossible to say how much procrastination is due to laziness, but some of it surely is.

Does your organization (and your boss) make you a procrastinator?

The most important organizational causes of procrastination are these:

• Impossible goals and crazy expectations. I find it hard to blame anyone for putting off beginning a task they feel sure will be a failure. In recent years, far too many managers have believed in the ‘magical’ effects of near-impossible goals. Our macho organizational cultures have fallen for the nonsense that performance will be improved by setting goals that seem out of reach, then hounding people to achieve them. All this does is make them feel miserable and frustrated. They don’t even gain any pleasure from achieving the target that seemed impossible, because they know that, if they do, it will be added to their normal workload and they will be set an even more inaccessible target.
• Poor (or no) training. People who don’t know what to do put things off rather than bumble around making mistakes (for which they will surely be blamed). They wait for inspiration, as noted already, hoping to find some way forward. If the boss is too busy to help them out (or too ready to treat any ‘weakness’ as an excuse to label people as losers), this waiting period can last for ever. They’re caught between equally unpleasant options: to have a go and perhaps make a bad error, or to hold back and be blamed for late inputs and lack of initiative. Either way, they take the blame for organizational meanness with the training budget.
• Goals that are imposed. Conventional management is all about command-and-control—whatever fine words and spin organizations use to try to conceal it. Leaders assume goal setting means they choose what goals they like (and which make them look good) and everyone else has to achieve them. They ignore the reality that, while people will work hard to achieve goals that they have had a hand in deciding, most people resent the idea of being driven to the edge of exhaustion to achieve goals that have been imposed on them. While employees might not be able to refuse, for fear of losing their jobs, they can still drag their feet. It may be a petty act of defiance, but it’s very understandable.
• Excessive uncertainty. If you think something contains too much risk, or there are too many variables for you to be able to make clear decisions, the simplest thing to do is hang back. It’s a leader’s role to reduce uncertainty. Too many increase it by establishing a vague strategy and leaving it to their subordinates to fill in the details.

The final organizational cause of procrastination is, I believe, the most important. That’s why I’m giving it a paragraph on its own.

A great deal of procrastination by subordinates is caused by indecision on the part of their leaders. As a result, team members lack guidance, are given confused and confusing instructions, are set tasks without first checking whether they have the necessary skills to achieve them, or are left waiting for a key decision from the boss—then blamed for the subsequent late running of the project.

The alternative

Imagine you are faced with a task for which you know you have the skills, which someone has taken the time to explain to you clearly and fully, which you have every reason to believe you can do well, and whose goals you believe you can achieve because you had a hand in setting them. In such a case, you have no reason to procrastinate—unless you’re lazy, disorganized and unmotivated, all of which can be tackled by the many sources of advice available on the Web and elsewhere.

Instead of taking the blame for procrastination on ourselves, as individuals, we should see it for what it is most likely to be: a symptom of poor organizational systems, inadequate strategies, unrealistic expectations and incompetent leadership. If we did that, maybe organizations would stop putting off finding a suitable answer.

Technorati Tags: procrastination, time management, priorities, getting things done, productivity

A book by Charles Jacobs (“Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science”)says it is—or most of it. Jacobs writes, “The managers who produce the best results are the ones who do the least managing. The biggest challenge is for managers to stop doing most of what they’re doing now.”

I haven’t yet read the book, only a review by Stefan Stern of The Financial Times. It seems that Mr. Jacobs, arguing from the findings of neuroscience and animal studies, claims we need to move on from standard management practices. They are, he says, ill-suited to human beings.

Who let the top dogs out?

I would be the last to defend ‘standard management practices’, which are indeed ill-suited to human beings (or any other species that doesn’t enjoy being lorded over, pushed around and manipulated for the benefit of the ‘top dogs’). I also agree that common practices like performance reviews and management appraisals often come very close to the definition of ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ the courts use to outlaw torture.

Yet this argument misses a fundamental point: our management practices today, however flawed and backward-looking, were invented by human beings. Indeed, they do exactly what they were designed to do: hold those at the top where they are and keep all the rest under tight control to prevent them disobeying or questioning the aforementioned ruling elite.

Know your place

Practices like appraisals are as much about reminding underlings of their place in the scheme of things (at the bottom, subject to constant judgment by the bosses) as they are about supposedly producing better results. They are also based firmly on the mind-set that pervades the whole edifice: that people are lazy, work-shy and disinterested in anything except their own short-term pleasure.

To get them to work, you have either to bribe them with rewards or threaten them with punishment. If you aren’t watching them, even for a moment, they’ll stop work and go back to lying around, gossiping and wasting your time. You are the master and they are your servants, so you set the rules and ensure they are followed, since, like all servants, they will probably steal the silverware if you don’t. It’s a totally 19th-century set of attitudes, little changed since the Industrial Revolution and invented by the owners of the grand houses of Regency and early-Victorian England.

All too human?

Chimpanzees, our nearest biological relatives, are violent, often blood-thristy animals who live in troops governed by an alpha male and subject to a strict hierarchy, partly based on ‘breeding’ (offspring of the alpha family start near the top of the heap, while the rest have to claw their way up).

Doesn’t that sound like many organizations today?

If so, it may be that our standard management practices are all too human—far too close to our unrefined animal nature and a long way from the rational choices we ought to be making about how to live our working lives.

Probably the best representation of standard management came in the original TV ‘Star Trek’. It wasn’t the rational, logical, objective Mr. Spock who ran the starship ‘Enterprise’, but the over-emotional and rash James Kirk. Mr. Spock’s role was usually to dig the captain out of whatever mess he’d landed them all in by his impulsive choices and egotistical urge to play the hero—the perfect image of the modern CEO.

Technorati Tags: management, management practics, leadership

Before blaming ‘communications’, look at the these five alternative possibilities.
 

Are organizational communications really as bad as they are made out to be? Do we need all the books, courses, articles and blogs on the subject? At one level, the answer has to be ‘yes’. Organizations are full of managers who confuse, lie to and manipulate their subordinates, executives who never listen to anyone and employees who hoard information and use every means possible to cover up their mistakes. There are also lots of honest, well-meaning people get caught up in misunderstandings, muddled intentions, incorrect assumptions and mixed messages.

Are ‘poor communications’ all that is behind these problems? I don’t think so. I think that ‘communications’ has become a buzzword that allows senior management to divert the blame and avoid dealing with the real issues.

Here are five serious issues that should always be checked out before jumping to the conclusion that ‘communication’ is what needs to be improved.

• Is the problem communication—or what is being communicated? The homespun saying that became famous during the last US presidential campaign sums it up: you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Executives, like politicians, are devotees of ‘spin’, but however you communicate an unacceptable message, the message remains unacceptable. Blaming poor communications for a poor response is diverting attention from what really matters: the message itself.
• Are the expectations behind the message impossible? Executives often blame poor communications—and “middle level managers who cannot motivate”—for the organization’s failure to deliver on what they promised, even if what they promised was never realistic in the first place. It’s the old chestnut called, “mistakes were made, but not by me.” To avoid admitting their own failure and incompetence, these executives try to shift the blame onto vague concepts like communications and, of course, onto lower-level managers.
• Was the failure due to poor systems? By jumping to the conclusion that communications lie at the root of every problem, you can postpone indefinitely any consideration of the systems within which people have to work. Blaming communications is cheap and attributes the problem to someone else. Accepting that systems are inadequate is likely to be expensive and, if you’re the person in overall charge, lays the blame squarely at your door.
• Was the thinking behind the communication too rushed? In many cases, what is diagnosed as a communications problem comes down to nothing more than a muddled and inadequately explained message. Before you blame the communicator or the process, ask yourself whether the message was prepared to adequately, laid out clearly and contained everything necessary to be understood. Managers are often in such a rush to do things they send out messages no one can understand.
• In the case of communications about goals or targets, was it clear to the recipient of the message what his or her role or task should be? It’s all too common for senior managers to throw out a slew of messages about what has to be achieved, and by when, without taking time to consider who needs to do what. You cannot blame poor communications for an inadequate strategy.
• Did the recipient listen? In upward communications, the most likely cause of any problem is simple: the person above has failed to listen. As executives rush from meeting to meeting, terrified that they might miss something—or that others are plotting behind their backs—they don’t give themselves time to listen to what is said to them. Later, when it becomes clear what they missed was important, they blame the other person for ‘poor communication’. In addition, many executives are so puffed up with their own sense of importance that they feel no need to listen to anyone. They aren’t kept in the dark by others; they do it to themselves.

Can communications be a problem within an organization? Indeed they can. Is it a topic that we should pay attention to? Of course. Is it as widespread a cause of problems as conventional management holds? I don’t think so, but no one will know for certain until managers and executives stop using it as an excuse and start inquiring into the true cause of the problems they face.

Technorati Tags: communications, workplace communications, management, leadership, motivation

Maybe motivation by management does more harm than good
 

I’m beginning to feel about motivation as I do about communication. Why are there so many books and articles about it? If one or two of them contained all you needed to do it well, the others would be unnecessary. It’s more likely that motivation has been hyped, like communication, because it’s a vague topic with broadly positive connotations—an ideal area for offerings from consultants, authors, publishers, and bloggers.

Why do we even need to motivate people? As far as I can see, people are well able to motivate themselves. Look at all the time, effort and money people devote to things that interest them. In the majority of cases, these activities often no material gain. They don’t help people’s careers, they don’t bolster them socially and they consume large amounts of money.

Just one example. Over the past few years, a group of enthusiasts in Great Britain raised enough money, and contributed enough unpaid labor, to build a steam locomotive to a 1940s design—starting from scratch. Now that it’s completed, the media excitement is over, and it pulled its first few trains of excited passengers, the only thing they have to look forward to is raising still more money, and contributing yet more unpaid labor, to keep it operating. Who ‘motivated’ them to do that?

The more I think about it, the more motivation by management seems to me to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Just as war is said to be diplomacy continued by other means, conventional management approaches to motivation are command-and-control given a more fashionable and acceptable face. The carrot may be dangled ahead, but the stick is never very far behind.

Why not appreciate people instead? It’s quick, cheap, uncomplicated and requires no training manuals or courses to learn how to do it.

This table summarizes my concerns with motivation and how I think appreciation avoids the problems.

Motivation has a fundamental dishonesty hidden within

My final concern is this: there’s a fundamental dishonesty at the base of motivation. Take the requirement that any leader should be able to motivate his or her staff. It sounds perfectly reasonable until you test the concept a little further.

I suspect anyone could ‘motivate’ any number of staff by offering them huge amounts of money or unlimited benefits. Of course, this isn’t what is required. The test of a leader’s skill in motivation is the ability to get people to do things without giving them more. It assumes a basic minimum use of incentives. Coercion is always cheapest.

That’s what I mean by a fundamental dishonesty. The leader is expected to save the organization money by persuading or manipulating people to work harder for less reward. This is the hidden agenda behind conventional approaches to motivation. It’s little wonder that there are so many books, articles and training courses on how to do it. It’s just another way of cutting costs.

Alternatives to motivation

• The first alternative I would offer is realism. There will always be situations in which people take jobs that they do not have much interest in, and would prefer not to do, purely out of economic necessity. They agreed to do the job because they needed the money.
       Why not accept this? All these people need is to be told what they have to do and be left to get on with it. Trying to motivate them is pointless. Expecting them to be ‘motivated’ is futile. All it does is add an unnecessary layer of guilt and coercion. Instead of accepting that they do what they’re paid to do, and being grateful for that, managers mark them down as uncommitted and lacking in team spirit — judging them against expectations that have nothing to do with the task, and that the employees never accepted when they signed on.
• My next alternative is appreciation. I think nearly everybody longs to be accepted and appreciated. You only have to look at the opposite to see this is so. People who are rejected and feel themselves to be undervalued swiftly become angry and depressed. You’ll never hear anyone say, “please don’t appreciate me. I really don’t like it.”
       If managers accepted people for who they are and what they can do, and openly appreciated whatever good results they obtained, there would be no need for motivation. People would naturally be drawn to repeating the actions that produced such a happy result.

Am I too skeptical about motivation? I don’t think so. The essence of skepticism is testing things to see if they live up to what is claimed for them. In this case, it seems to me that motivation falls a long way short. At the very least, it suggests the ways being used to motivate people today need considerable revision.

If motivation is truly command-and-control management being carried on behind a smokescreen of smiling faces, it’s hard to see that we need it at all.

Technorati Tags: motivation, management, command-and-control, management myths

Is there still time to reverse a global pandemic—more contagious than swine flu, more deadly than Ebola—that has brought economies to their knees?
 

The hysteria surrounding H1N1 swine flu has concealed the growth of a much more deadly pandemic; one that has been circling the world for a number of years and shows, as yet, no sign of decreasing in intensity. I refer, of course, to Mad Manager Disease (MMD)—a virulent infection of the brain that warps reasoning, undermines balance, destroys judgment and reduces those suffering from it to helpless dependency on mind-altering drugs like bonuses and stock options.

It is amazing that the World Health Organization has yet to offer formal warnings on this subject or recommend the temporary closure of business schools—the principal sources of infection. Known carriers of the disease, such as CEOs (an acronym for Chief Excuses Officers), other top executives and any number of management gurus, need to be placed in the long-term quarantine.

The symptoms of the disease

How can you tell whether someone you have to deal with has caught the virus? The principal symptoms of the disease are strikingly similar to other viral infections like influenza:

• High temperature. Sufferers are constantly stressed, overheated and excitable. Everything has to be done at high speed, preferably by yesterday. Their ability to cope with normal levels of uncertainty in life becomes impaired, so they engage in a frantic search for predictability, typically based on large amounts of wishful thinking.
       As the disease reaches its terminal stages, many sufferers’ overheated brains produce hallucinations (typically of personal triumphs), coupled with delusions of grandeur and invincibility. Arrogance and bullying are widespread from first infection, but tend to grow steadily worse. In terminal cases, there is a complete loss of any sense of reality shortly before the onset of final brain-death.
       Becoming overheated and constantly rushed leads to irrational phobias. People suffering from rabies are said to become fearful of water. Sufferers from MMD become terrified by change. The disease acts to enlarge the command-and-control centers of the brain, resulting in obsessive micromanagement, an irrational desire to impose pointless rules and procedures, and a progressive collapse of trust in subordinates. MMD also resembles rabies in causing infected creatures to launch unprovoked attacks on anyone within range.
• Dizziness and loss of balance. Two of the commonest signs of infection are ‘management myopia’ and ‘measurement-itis’. Management myopia produces an inability to see beyond the end of your nose and a total focus on short-term results. Measurement-itis has been explained as a serious inflammation of the statistical nodes of the brain, leading to the obsessive collection of meaningless data. Since the statistical nodes are poorly developed in many managers anyway, sufferers are unable to make sense of the information they have collected and resort instead to simplistic rules of thumb.
       MMD produces a loss of balance when dealing with expectations, work schedules and budgets. Indeed, the attempt to impose unrealistic, unbalanced versions of any of these should be seen as an immediate indicator of an infection. Balance is also lost in considering priorities, especially between employee needs and financial requirements. Infected individuals typically display an obsessive craving for spreadsheets and financial ratios, further undermining their sanity.
• Nausea. Most infections produce nausea in the sufferer. MMD is unique in that it produces nausea in everyone who comes into contact with the person suffering from it. The behavioral symptoms of the disease—macho posturing, obsessive greed, blatant self-interest and a complete indifference to the welfare of others—are more than enough to make any normal person feel sick.
       From time to time, those suffering from the disease do produce a particularly foul form of vomit, made up of management jargon, half-digested buzzwords, meaningless ratios and PowerPoint presentations. When this happens, bystanders are strongly advised to take cover. To be drenched in this stuff can be life-threatening.
• Weakness. The judgment of those suffering from Mad Manager Disease becomes weaker by the day. In time, they are unable to make any decisions of a rational nature. Instead, they resort to management myths, constant repetition of the past and an excessive reliance on conventional methodologies.
       Secondary infections are also common. Sufferers frequently succumb to every prevailing fashion, and their brains are easily taken over by parasitic ideas spawned by popular management gurus. Serious invasions by fungus spores such as benchmarking and belief in industry best practice are sadly common.
       MMD quickly destroys the imaginative elements of the brain. This leaves sufferers paralyzed with indecision in the face of changes in circumstances. This stage of the disease made a major contribution to the current economic melt-down. Despite all the evidence that existing management methods were no longer working, sufferers were unable to imagine any alternatives.

Fortunately, MMD is both curable and preventable. Widespread reading and the cultivation of an open mind provide effective vaccination, as does a healthy dose of skepticism on a regular basis. The most effective treatment is a rigorous exercise program based on freethinking and questioning of all conventional ‘wisdom’, coupled with a regular diet of active non-conformity. In critical cases, however, the only cure may be escaping from corporate life altogether.

With careful mental hygiene and isolation from sources of infection, anyone can avoid this pandemic. If you remember to wash your mind free from all macho assumptions and management myths on a regular basis, you should be fine.

Technorati Tags: management, leadership, judgment, macho management

(This is another guest article from Michael Taplin.)

Creativity is the source of renewal. It lies at the heart of the human spirit, and it is the source of all progress. We cannot kill it, because creative people will leave the organization rather than have their spirit suffocated. Yet history is littered with the bones of organizations that have died in the attempt to remove creativity. Renewal of systems and processes is essential if the organization is to contribute to the society it feeds and feeds upon. Innovation of product and service is the way we create a new, and hopefully better, future.

But creativity has a down side too. Unguided creativity leads to anarchy and management becomes a random walk, finding a crisis at every turn. To flourish, organizations need a degree of consistency and creativity is its enemy. If the business that values consistency over creativity will surely die as it becomes irrelevant to its customers, so a business that values creativity over consistency will fail to provide reliable performance for those same customers. Constant innovation without direction and purpose is unlikely to generate customer value. The challenge is to achieve the right balance.

Consistency matters

We see the importance of consistency in successful branding strategies. Changes that add value to the brand, by reinforcing the brand image and extending the franchise, are vital to long term growth strategies. Otherwise good, creative ideas need to be assessed against established brand criteria and rejected if they do not fit.¹

Another dimension of consistency that has long-term survival value is quality: ‘fit for purpose’ performance. Deming showed us that 90% of errors are system failure and only 10% human error. We should not behave as if all errors are due to incompetent or ill-motivated people. Too many managers and business owners are reluctant to accept that the management system itself is flawed and cannot produce the consistent quality needed for success.

Yin and yang

I suggest the best metaphor we can use to understand the true relationship between creativity and consistency is the oriental concept of Yin and Yang. This idea illustrates their essential duality. One has to be balanced by the other. Creativity and consistency are equally essential elements that must coexist and run in parallel. Flipping from one to the other can only create doubt and uncertainty in the minds of the very people whose commitment is necessary for prosperity.

Finding the right balance between creativity and consistency isn’t always easy. Decisions that are inconsistent with the values of the business or the brand as perceived by customers will detract from the businesses survival prospects. Decisions that inhibit creativity will destroy the spirit that renews the organization to meet the challenges of the ever-changing environment. But leaders have an obligation to balance the yin of creativity with the yang of consistency. It is their job.

Finding the right balance

Unless the leaders of an organization can promote this balance and provide a clear point of reference for everyone, there will always be problems.

One way is through the much-maligned statement of values. If a decision is consistent with the agreed and adopted values of the organization, it may not do much good, but it can do little or no harm. That’s why decisions that are inconsistent with these values should be rejected.

Maintenance of this standard is a key responsibility of leadership. If managers want to become leaders, they should be prepared to breathe life into the organization’s statement of values so that it becomes the beacon by which the course is set and progress is measured. Only then can an organization be consistent and creative. Only then will it have a basis for setting the right balance between these qualities and making sure its actions fit that balance.

Note:
¹ For a pithy discussion of how getting this wrong puts the business at risk, check out The Cola War in “Marketing Warfare”by Ries and Trout.

Michael Taplin is the driving force behind bizlearn.biz. He spent 25 years as an independent consultant, owning and running successful businesses that trained thousands of people in large organizations. 12 years ago he left the Australian corporate scene behind to move to rural New Zealand, where he got close to the small business culture and has been a volunteer business mentor working through Business Mentor NZ. As a Teaching Fellow of the Graduate School of Business at Massey University , he has taught in both the MBA and Public Sector Management programs and worked in the small island nations of the Pacific where he made many friends.

Technorati Tags: creativity, consistency, managing change, quality, leadership, keeping balance