Loyalty is earned (and lost) mostly by leadership action
 

Approximately 25% of employees do not feel loyal to their current employer. Around 20% say they are likely to leave their current position to change jobs within a year. These disturbing figures come from a recent CareerBuilder.com survey of HR professionals and hiring managers. Although I am not completely surprised by them, the percentages warrant leaders’ attention.

Ongoing recruitment, training and retention are costly endeavors for any business. In addition, disengaged employees erode morale, productivity and profitability. Like one bad apple in a dish, their attitudes tend to be infectious, spreading negativity to fellow employees, further exacerbating the problem and escalating the overall damage. Far too many employees spend their lives in a state of more-or-less comfortable misery. Something really must be done about this issue.

Poor leaders make for disloyal, disengaged teams

The top reasons listed for disloyalty in CareerBuilder.com’s survey were:

1. “I don’t feel my employer values me” (61%)
2. “My efforts are not recognized or appreciated” (52%)
3. “My employer doesn’t pay enough” (51%)
4. “Not enough career advancement opportunities” (44%).

The survey shows plainly that employee dissatisfaction can be attributed primarily to leadership skill and effectiveness. These are all issues over which we as leaders exercise either control or influence and it’s critical that we manage them purposefully and proactively.

Of course individuals play a role and must assume some level of responsibility for their own satisfaction; but the reality is that it is up to those of us who hold leadership positions to act effectively, intelligently and passionately and thus inspire our teams to respond in kind.

Putting leadership right

All effective leaders have to connect with their teams; success depends on it. Michael Stallard captures the concept well, stating that:

“Unless the people in an organization have a strong sense of connection—a bond that promotes trust, cooperation, and esprit de corps—they will never reach their potential as individuals, and the organization will never reach its potential.”

He suggests that we:

• Make a human connection with as many people as possible
• Treat and speak to employees as partners
• Help employees find the right roles
• Educate, inform, and listen to employees
• Decentralize decision making
• Recognize the human need for work/life balance

Lead with passion and purpose for engagement and long term satisfaction

How are you encouraging loyalty in your team? What are your retention rates and trends? When teams are feeling invested, the end results extend far beyond individual performance. The converse is also true. People who don’t feel trusted and valued will do little more than go through the motions—sometimes not even that.

While you can’t fully control the decisions individuals will make, you can be mindful of the dynamics that foster satisfaction and retention, and proactively employ them with your team. Inspiring loyalty isn’t difficult, though it does require awareness and commitment. Doing so will profit everyone in the end. Be sure to help all of your ‘village members’ actively manage their careers.

Technorati Tags: leadership, loyalty, retention, high performance, career management

Sometimes leaving people alone is key to successful leadership
 

Sally P. was overworked, burned-out, stressed and exhausted—the whole nine yards. That’s why her boss asked me to talk to her to see if I could help. It didn’t take long to discover the truth. Sally routinely stayed at her desk until 9.00 or 10.00 p.m., though she started work before 8.00 in the morning.

“What do you do?” I asked her.

“All day I’m busy with meetings, customers and staff matters,” she told me. “It’s madness. I only get to do the stuff I need to do after everyone else goes home. Even then I need to spend hours checking everything has been done correctly. Sorting out tomorrow’s schedule. That kind of thing.”

What it came down to was this. Sally checked all the work her subordinates did, even down to correcting typos in their reports and re-ordering “faulty” priorities. When I suggested this was a waste of her time, she got angry.

“Not at all,” she said. “It’s essential. You’ve no idea the mistakes I find. It would be dreadful to let things like that slip past.”

“And what do you say to your people?” I asked.

“Well, I tell them, naturally. Sometimes I get cross with them.”

“And…? Have things changed?”

“Not really. I mean, you can’t get good people today, can you?”

When bosses interfere

Sally’s staff didn’t check their own mistakes because they knew she would do it anyway. They didn’t change because she treated them like naughty children, so that’s how they saw themselves. Besides, they knew she didn’t trust them to do better, so why bother?

Organizations are full of pointless activities that are only needed because nobody trusts anybody else. Full of people who can’t delegate; who have to attend pointless meetings, in case something is said or decided behind their backs; who have to double check and edit their subordinates’ work, because they don’t trust them to do it properly; and who have to devote time to regular boot-licking, because they suspect no one trusts them either.

Yet these same employees who aren’t trusted to behave reasonably in working hours are apparently worthy to choose a government, act on school boards and in positions of public trust, bring up children, handle their own finances and fight and die for their country.

If you pay peanuts, the saying goes, you get monkeys. If you treat employees like naughty children or incipient criminals, that’s pretty much what they’ll become—at least during working hours. And you’ll be like Sally: overworked, stressed, burned-out and neurotic—the typical image of today’s version of Organization Man.

A lesson from a master gardener

My father was a wonderful gardener. His garden was the envy of the neighbors, and the food he grew kept our family supplied with fruit and vegetables year-round. The secret of his success with plants was simple. He made sure the soil was in good condition, planted at the right time, kept the weeds in check—then left the plants to grow.

“Neglect ’em a bit,” he used to tell me. “Don’t be fussing around too much. Plants thrive on a bit of neglect.”

Good leaders and managers do the same as my father. They practice benign neglect. The idiots who cause problems are always fussing around their staff, probing and peering and interfering with them doing their jobs. They’re like children who plant a few seeds and want to dig them up the next day to see if they’re growing. You can forgive children; adults should know better.

‘Benign Neglect’

One of the best ways to help your people find success and develop themselves is to do what my father did. Make sure they have the right conditions—the authority, the resources, the training and clear direction; start them off at the right time—when they’re ready for the challenge; and then let them get on with it. It’s their job, not yours. If they’re busy, you don’t need to be. Neglect them a little. Do your own work.

A major part of that work should be keeping down the weeds. Keep others away from interfering with your people’s jobs. Cut down unnecessary demands. Pull up useless meetings and slice off pointless reports. Weeds like that can choke any hope of good results. Be ruthless. Clear a space for your team to thrive and grow.

What’s most often missing from people’s working lives is time and space to do their job and develop as they should—plus the sense that the boss will let them get on with it, unless they call for help. Benign neglect works. It shows you trust them. It shows you believe in their commitment and ability. Plants thrive on a bit of neglect and so do people. Try it.

Technorati Tags: leadership, micromanagement, micromanagers, bad bosses, benign neglect, development, trust

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Sometimes it’s better to be respected and not liked than to be liked and not respected
 

© Dusaleev V. - Fotolia.com   

It’s critical that a leader must possess honesty. Not only must he or she be honest in behavior, but they must also call things as they see them. All leaders face situations in which they must figure out the right way to say something to an employee or group of employees—maybe something those people would prefer not to hear.

The easiest, and usually most successful, way to address such situations is to ignore the politics and say what you believe, using the clearest, most honest mode of communication you can put together. Too often, people try to ‘spin’ their message or couch things in a way they hope will produce a desired result. That’s quite a risk. It’s tough to be sure that your message will be interpreted by the recipient in exactly the way you want. And, if you get it wrong, you’ll be in a worse position than if you had been honest.

Trust and openness produce the best results for me

I live by this philosophy: I can either say something about the situations or stay silent. For example, if an employee charged with an assignment does not perform to my expectations, I can either tell that person or say nothing.

For sure, the best thing that I can do to prevent similar, negative situations from reoccurring is to speak out. How he or she know my expectations were not met, or know how to correct things in the future, without a clear, unambiguous communication? And while some people find such communications difficult to hear—mostly those that have committed the undesirable performance— most respond with appreciation for the honesty and the opportunity to correct course going forward.

Face up to the risks

Delivering such open, honest criticism can open you up to being labeled with less than desirable names. Yet, in a classic risk-reward trade-off, it also can lead to you being considered a clear, candid communicator. Without such communications, individuals who perform less than ideally would not be given productive, fruitful criticism; and they would not likely modify their future behavior or performance.

Besides, if poor performance and unacceptable behavior are tolerated, others in the organization will come to the conclusion that senior management doesn’t care about the quality or nature of employee performance. This belief, if allowed to fester and pervade an organization, can undermine all future prospects prospects.

Balancing it out

To ensure the best team performance and outcomes, be sure to speak clearly, openly and as honestly as you can. To me, the risk of being negatively labeled is more than offset by the rewards of overall organizational performance gain—as well as the respect which I can earn by demonstrating candor and integrity.

I think that it’s better to be respected and not liked than to be liked and not respected. I strongly encourage those around me to speak openly and candidly with a focus on overall performance. Sometimes, it may create negative feelings. But when faced with a choice between saying something to make a person aware of a problem, or not saying anything and simply hoping for some change, there’s no contest. Say what you need to say and say it as clearly as possible.

Technorati Tags: communication, clarity, integrity, honesty, facing up to problems, trust, openness

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Trust is the foundation for creating a civilized working environment
 

Many people are miserable, alienated and overworked primarily because of a lack of trust. Managers take on too much themselves, because they don’t trust their subordinates to do the work properly. They cannot leave people alone to get on with their work, because they don’t believe other people will do a good job without constant supervision. They attend pointless meetings and read futile cc’d e-mails, because they don’t trust their colleagues not to knife them in the back. And they pile up extra tasks, because they don’t trust suppliers not to cheat them, and customers to stay loyal or resist the temptations put before them by competitors.

In an environment that lacks trust, everyone feels suspicious of everyone else. The subliminal message that runs constantly in the background is: “Hurry up to put one over on the other guy before he or she manages to do it to you.” Relationships are scanned for evidence of some hidden agenda. It’s almost a relief to face a truly nasty, hostile person, because at least then you know where you stand.

Not trusting others is a symptom of fear . . .

W. Edwards Deming, mostly remembered as the father of the Total Quality Movement, said that the primary duty of every leader is to remove fear from the workplace. Yet today fear seems more present, and more powerful, than ever. Managing by fear is ubiquitous, whether it appears as straightforward bullying and dictatorial behavior, or more indirectly through constant reminders that everyone’s job is on the line and those who fail to deliver what is demanded will likely find themselves holding pink slips.

Macho managers don’t remove fear from the workplace, they increase it. Command-and-control leadership styles rely on fear to be effective. Even so-called ‘incentives’ are really a subtle form of fear-creation: people are afraid they’ll get less than their colleagues; they’re afraid they’ll miss out; they’re fearful that they cannot rely on that bonus in the way they could rely on a set salary.

Competition—that sacred cow of management thinking and free-market economics—is entirely about fear. Lust for winning is only the other side of the same coin as fear of losing. Success cannot exist with failure. If I win, someone else must lose or that winning becomes meaningless. And if I want to ‘win big’ (as all those tottering banks and hedge funds did), I have to try to work it so that someone else ‘loses big’ at the same time. The scale of the current financial turmoil is witness to the extent to which unchecked competition, once lauded as a source of endless wealth and success, always produces losses on a similar scale.

. . . And so is lack of trust in yourself

The belief in your own ability to find a way through life and come out more or less where you would like to be is founded on self-trust. If you don’t trust yourself, it’s hard to develop any trust in others either. That gnawing, internal fear that you’ll probably screw up transfers itself to a suspicion that the other guy is probably waiting to gloat when you do.

Lack of self-trust is behind much of the dogmatic, rigid thinking that characterizes so many organizational leaders. If you don’t trust your ability to think for yourself, the simplest way to avoid embarrassment is to follow a set of rules produced by someone else. It prevents you from needing to find an answer that fits the current circumstances, of course—which you fear you won’t be able to do anyway—but it allows you to get off the hook of trusting your own judgment. After all, if things go wrong, the rules were to blame, not you.

People who lack self-trust have an extra need to be right all the time to allay their inner feelings of anxiety. In reality, while being right is nice, it’s more important to learn to trust your own intelligence and judgment than it is to be right every time. We all make mistakes. Those who trust themselves try to learn from them; those who don’t try to avoid the blame for future mistakes by doing what everyone else does, even if it’s wrong.

Trust is risky, but distrust is worse

In bad times, people naturally try to gain some kind of stability and safety. They don’t want to add more risks to those they can see all around them. They play safe and act suspicious.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but this is the riskiest behavior of them all. Like the hedgehog who deals with an approaching car by stopping and rolling up in middle of the road (Do armadillos do this, I wonder?), it’s an invitation to be run over. When you trust no one, everyone becomes an enemy of sorts. When you constantly look for safety, the greatest temptation is to follow all the other lemmings off the edge of the cliff.

We are social creatures, whose interconnected world will not allow us to withdraw into our own little castle and pull up the drawbridge. We cannot live with co-operating with others. The belief that markets will be ‘perfect’ when each person pursues his or her own self-interest, regardless of others, is surely one of the silliest and most unrealistic ideas ever to grip that dismal pseudo-science called economics. It was acting on that false assumption that put us all in the mess we’re in today.

Where fear and mistrust rule, there can be no happiness, no enjoyment, no creativity, and no sense of meaning in working life. All there will be is suspicion, anxiety, constant pressure, and the belief that protecting your own butt while kicking someone else’s is what work is all about. Surely it’s time to wake up and see that living like this, however much money is made in the process, is no kind of living at all.

Technorati Tags: trust, relationships, being inter-connected, coping with fear, workplace fears, macho management, workplace stress, management by fear, working life

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Tackling issues requires different—often multiple — leadership approaches. The complexity of the situation will dictate the response. While routine problems are generally solved through experience and expertise, complex issues tend to be tackled more effectively with innovative solutions.

Ronald Heifetz, Harvard professor and co-founder of its Center for Public Leadership, encourages leaders to act according to these principles when the going gets tough, like today:

• Openly acknowledge the complexity of the issues head on, without attempting to minimize the difficulties involved. Research has found that ignoring or oversimplifying complex challenges does not work.
• Avoid authoritative (top-down) solutions. Shift responsibility for problems from the leader to the primary stakeholders.
• Consider how individuals’ differing values influence their views and behaviors. This is not a “right” or “wrong” analysis. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that, as everyone views situations differently, buy-in necessitates a multi-pronged approach.

A way forward

Consider the challenges that you are facing. What is and is not working? Map it out. Think about how you are communicating with your teams. Heifetz suggests those who are think about and incorporate the concepts noted above manage more effectively.

Now try these five tips, which I have based on his principles:

1. Confront the problem. Don’t dodge the issue. Acknowledge it openly.
2. Reject absolutes. Get comfortable with the idea that there is no “right” answer.
3. Avoid expressions of power or dominance. Promote and encourage an atmosphere in your teams that is conducive to cooperative thought and execution.
4. Celebrate differences. Acknowledge that differences are vital to a full appreciation of issues and their most effective resolution.
5. Recognize your own built-in bias. No one person’s ideas will ever represent an absolute truth— and that includes yours.

There is no one, single, perfect way to get a difficult job done—quite the contrary. Eliciting the best performance possible demands an environment that rewards innovation and cooperation as a means to results. But should things turn sour, and a complex problem become a “crisis”, the best way to begin turning your issue around starts with slowing down and thinking fully about the issues involved.

Theodore Roosevelt said: “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good [people] to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” Make an assessment of your own performance in dealing with tough times. Try implementing some of the ideas above in areas needing improvement. I believe that you’ll see more innovation and a wider ownership of the need for action as a result.

Technorati Tags: handing tough issues, leadership principles, facing up to problems, innovation, celebrating differences

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Why leaders need to let others share responsibility for coping with tough times
 

Drawing of Lao Tzu

The personal power of leaders only extends so far. But as the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu reminds us, great leaders empower their people.

Remember this today.

There are some great books on leadership and, increasingly, some great blogs; and there has certainly been a fascination with the subject of management and leadership over the last 20 years.

Indeed, most generations seek to redefine “leadership” according to their own times. Yet, while each new generation adds to the body of knowledge, sometimes it can pay to revisit the earliest leadership writings.

The limits of power

Lao Tzu was a contemporary of Confucius. He is credited as the author of ‘Tao Te Ching’—a book which is now widely quoted in management teachings.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Chapter 17:

Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, “We did this ourselves.”

Great leaders know that personal power extends only as far as one’s personal reach. This is power by control. However, as Jamie Notter points out, “leadership is effectively a capacity within the entire system,” When it works this way, ownership in the efforts of an organization rests with the entire team. By honoring the efforts and input of your village, leaders effectively transform their businesses with little resistance. After all, one does not need to “sell-in” a change when the change is self-initiated and driven by the individuals in your team.

As Positivity Blog points out on the ‘Positivity Blog’, Lao Tzu is about “getting things done”—which is another way of managing to outcomes. And as a leader, there can be no greater satisfaction than seeing your team celebrating their own leadership successes.

Applying this learning to today

In times like these, we must, more than ever, leverage the diversity of our people and avoid hitting the panic button. Our emotions affect how we respond to changing conditions as well as to one another—and they’re highly contagious.

When we experience negative emotions—especially fear and distress–-we tend to spiral into avoidance, paralysis or hysteria. These mindsets feed off one another, clearly inhibit productivity, and can swell to epidemic proportions if collectively embraced. As leaders, we have to be vigilant about infusing passion and positivity into everything we do if we want our teams to be focused and optimistic in turn. After all, we have large and difficult challenges to face individually and collectively—and we will need every ounce of innovation, creativity and collaborative teamwork to move forward.

How can you best reward risk taking while concurrently discouraging over-zealousness? Look for the leaders amongst your teams—those that demonstrate strong emotional intelligence. Look for those who are resilient, confident and highly communicative, infusing their teams with those same qualities and energy.

Nurture your team’s abilities to cope with stress and negativity, and you will be rewarded with people with enhanced confidence who can deliver stronger performance and success.

Technorati Tags: coping with tough times, nurturing others, leadership, avoiding negativity, handling emotions, empowerment, dealing with stress

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Has Our Obsession with Quantification Caused Our Downfall?
 

At the height of the credit boom, one of the pieces of mythologogy doing the rounds was that you could quantify and measure risk so precisely that it pretty much ceased to be . . . well, risky. Banks and hedge funds employed all kinds of pointy-headed types, from mathematicians to theoretical physicists, to produce ‘risk-management’ algorithms that they claimed made it possible to make money all of the time.

Like every other kind of ‘sure thing’, from infallible gambling systems to simple ways to make millions with nothing more than a home computer and a whole lot of faith, this one too proved to be little more than the latest version of snake oil.

The interesting point, however, is not so much that another infallible system failed, as why people seem to be so prone to believing in the myth of quantification as a substitute for common sense?

Misunderstanding numbers

Part of the problem, I believe, comes from a basic misunderstanding of numbers. Numbers represent a precise language in which it is perfectly possible to express the most total nonsense.

Words sometimes have quite imprecise meanings, but a number is a number. Two never means three, or ‘nearly two’ or ‘somewhere between one and five’. You can add numbers together a zillion times and always get the same answer. They are so reassuringly precise on the surface that they lull us into believing that whatever comes in numbers is as precise as they are.

That, of course, is not true. While I can set the odds on something to the fifth—or fiftieth—decimal place, and verify my computation as many times as I like, all that super-precise number is telling me is the outcome of a process that might well be full of unsupported assumptions, logical holes and guesswork.

The numerical precision of the outcome—often enhanced by the fact that it was produced by an ‘infallible’ computer (which is not infallible either and whose precision is merely mechanical)—seems to allow people to forget that what it represents is no more that a statement of someone’s thinking: a human product as likely to be full of holes and mistakes as any other.

Human nature, numbers and risk

Human beings are both uncomfortable and incompetent when it comes to dealing with risks—even more so when that risk is mixed up with the impenetrable jargon of possibilities. Yet risk is what leadership is all about. If what to do is clear and there is little or no uncertainty about the outcome, who needs a leader?

Strategy, by definition, deals with trying to estimate what to do for the best in situations of extreme uncertainty and ambiguity. Numbers don’t work well to express ambiguity. Their calculation is too unreliable when there are multiple sources of ambiguity and no way of deciding between them. Put simply, in ambiguous and unquantifiable (precisely!) situations, numbers are both misleading and often plain impossible to produce with any accuracy.

Still, the big bosses want numbers, so the little workers dutifully churn them out, even if they know they’re nonsense from the start. By they time they reach the executive suite, they’ve been sanctified by so many committees and middle managers that no one will question them.

Leadership should be based on judgment, not computation

It is exactly in such ambiguous situations that too many executives put their greatest trust in numbers—even though that’s when numbers are at their least accurate or useful.

I suspect that it’s the precision of numbers that causes the problem. They seem so reassuring when everything else is vague and impossible to get a hold of. The same long-term, uncertain aspects of strategic decisions that make us so insecure increase the surface attractiveness of quantified data. Indeed, the more complex they appear to be—and the less we understand them—the more ‘scientific’ we’re tempted to assume they are.

People who feel afraid that they may not be doing the right thing, or making the correct choices, want to see some numbers to lull themselves into the belief that they have a solid basis on which to decide. That’s make-believe, of course; any half-competent statistician can make those numbers say whatever he or she wants them to say. But it’s such wonderfully reassuring make-believe.

Omens, auguries and statistics

The ancient Romans used to sacrifice animals and scan their livers for signs to help them decide on the right course of action for future. We laugh at such ‘unscientific’ ideas, but are we so very different?

They had some very precise guidelines for what did or did not count as an omen. Those who made these auguries did so according to careful observations and a clear set of ideas about what each spot or blemish meant. The emperor and his courtiers weren’t expected to understand such esoteric ideas. That’s what they employed augurs to do for them. The emperor’s job was to listen to what the augurs said, then decide, basing his decision on whatever they told him.

How is that so different from the CEO who listens to some manager droning through a PowerPoint presentation that lists the precise risks and benefits of a plan. That CEO is just as unlikely to have anything save the sketchiest notion of what on earth lies behind all those calculations; let alone be able to decide whether they are based on anything but the craziest estimates of future conditions.

I began my working life as a very junior person producing statistical projections for my betters. Did I always know what I was doing? Hell, no. Much of what I did was based on assumptions those same people gave me to work with. In essence, I was turning their guesswork and gut-feel into numbers. At the end of the process, what came out was no better than what went in (sometimes worse, if I miscalculated). However, since it was now safely expressed in ‘scientific’, quantified ways, it commanded a level of respect it never would have had before.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. The future cannot be computed. Risks cannot be fully quantified. It’s the job of leaders to stick to reality and acknowledge they cannot know in advance what will happen—then use their best judgment anyway. Guesses and assumptions masquerading as scientific calculations are still guesses. They’ve only changed their clothing.

A risk is always a risk. A big one is riskier than a small one. Acknowledge that and you’re at least forewarned that your strategy may well go wrong. Pretend you’ve found a way to make it a near certainty and you’ll probably bet the farm on it—then have to run to the tax-payer to bail you out.

Technorati Tags: strategy, strategic thinking, quantifying risks, executive decisions, leadership thinking, managing risk, planning the future

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Performance under pressure is a leadership prerequisite
 

The global economy continues to experience extreme volatility as we digest and react to the most severe financial environment many of us have ever witnessed. The latest developments, including the colossal intervention—a.k.a. “bailout”—by the US government to ease an ever-expanding crisis, have not yet alleviated the markets’ fears.

This crisis highlights some scary attitudes that we have developed both as citizens and leaders—we want quick and easy resolutions to all our problems, with minimal personal responsibility and accountability. We have low thresholds for pain and even less tolerance for patience or failure.

All the gain; none of the pain

Put bluntly, we want the economy to be bailed out, but we don’t want to foot the bill. We want cheaper gas, but we want to continue to drive our vehicles of choice, eschew public transportation and equivocate when it comes to investments in alternative energy sources. We want to be homeowners, but we don’t want to have to save for a down payment or have to pay uncomfortable mortgage payments.

In essence, we want all the rewards with none of the accompanying discomforts, risks or responsibilities.

There’s no such thing as painless leadership

Challenges, difficulties and setbacks are all part of the package, and essential components of standard business cycles, ongoing growth and development, and life in general. John McDonnell, former CEO of McDonnell Douglas, noted that, “adversity introduces you to yourself.” To navigate sub-optimal conditions makes you come face-to-face with your strengths, weaknesses and abilities. It is from the midst of the most challenging conditions that true leaders emerge. Remember how much adversity Oprah Winfrey confronted in her life and how she chose to emerge from it all like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Of course no one likes discomfort, let alone failure. But “the fastest way to succeed,” IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr., once said, “is to double your failure rate.” The best leaders know that failure is a prerequisite to invention and innovation.

What’s more, many leaders must nurture others through failures as well. Our best products and processes tend to be launched by those willing to both encourage risk taking—which means being open and able to learn from all the inevitable mistakes . . . and take responsibility for them too. Failure in life and business is not just acceptable. In many ways, it’s desirable. It rewards us with lessons that could not otherwise be learned.

Coping with challenging times

Challenging times require resilience and the ability to tackle and overcome adversity. Setbacks and upheavals often provide the best opportunities for innovation and growth, if you’re up to the challenge. True leaders don’t whine or succumb to hardship; they acknowledge the difficulties, learn from them and resolve to move forward.

We can all use these turbulent times to determine acceptable risk tolerance for ourselves and our organizations. We can learn if we’re ready for less than ideal conditions and how to make the most out of the worst. We can start to differentiate ourselves with creativity and the willingness to face reality. Performance under pressure is a leadership prerequisite. Anyone who cannot cope with tough times has no claim to being a leader at all.

Technorati Tags: true leadership, coping with tough times, learning from adversity, testing capability, proving your worth, coping with failure

When making the numbers is mistaken for making the grade, the only route is downwards

Photo: © Yanik Chauvin - Fotolia.com

‘Management by Making the Numbers’ — today’s fashionable choice amongst the macho and the greedy — produces a debased kind of leadership. We can only keep a working environment worthy of a civilized nation by valuing some things more highly than making the numbers. That means accepting ‘the numbers’ won’t be achieved — should not be achieved — if the price paid is the loss of honesty, dignity, integrity and humanity as guiding principles of corporate life.

People under pressure to deliver ‘the numbers’ will usually do so by whatever means are simplest and least risky. In time, that leads to using various unethical approaches, in the same way that it’s easier to get rich by cheating and theft than by working hard. If all top management care about is hitting or exceeding target, they’re likely to overlook little things such bending the rules. They’re especially likely to ignore management bullying, since they can re-interpret it as ’strong leadership’ or ’setting high standards’, and the victims as ‘losers’ and ‘weaklings’. Read the full story

For a happy organization, ‘coherence’ between structure and objectives matters

One of the differences between a happy and an unhappy organization is how well its structures and processes match its objectives. You can call this ‘coherence’ — a coherent organization is one which is organized and managed in a way that embraces its objectives, rather than just not getting in the way.

If you join a high-pressure mortgage broker or a Caymans-based hedge fund, you’re not necessarily looking for thoughtful management and career development or a well-run organization. You’re looking to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, and then get out. On the other hand, you can’t run an organization that feeds the homeless, or calculates peoples’ taxes, as though it were a pirate ship.

These are extreme examples, but they illustrate a simple truth that there are basically two types of organizations: those that produce what economists call ‘public goods’, which benefit all of us, and those that don’t. The simple test that differentiates them is this: would anyone mind if they weren’t there? The world can live without gossip magazines, bond dealers and the eighty-third different kind of sugary breakfast cereal. It can’t so easily live without clean drinking water, public transport and an honest system of justice. Read the full story