Morals have failed to curb business malfeasance. Maybe it’s time to try real ethics.
 

Moses with the Ten Commandments
Painting by Rembrandt

There have been many—probably far too many—articles in the media complaining about the corruption, greed and dishonesty apparent at every level of business in recent years. Solutions abound, usually linked to the idea of better moral and ethical teaching. The trouble is, morality has been around since the earliest periods of recorded history, and it has yet to prevent people from behaving in ways that break just about every moral rule.

If something doesn’t work, the only sensible course of action is to try another approach. It is also sensible, before doing that, to wonder why people go on behaving badly and defying society’s norms. Answers based on the supposedly debased nature of mankind, like the claim of original sin, don’t do it for me. They avoid the question by claiming mankind is inherently immoral. Even if that were true, it would explain nothing.

What I want instead is a way of understanding why conventional approaches to moral rules—based, as they all are, on a combination of stick-and-carrot and pleasing the powerful—are never make mankind any less inconsiderate and selfish than we are today.

I think I may have found one, based on understanding the fundamental difference between morals and ethics: morals are external, imposed rules; ethics are principles derived from individual thinking.

Thought is the basis of ethics

What started me on this track was an article on the HBR Editor’s Blog and the link there to a book by a fifth-grade teacher called Rafe Esquith, who for decades has been teaching groups of the children of Latin American and Korean immigrants at Los Angeles’ Hobart Boulevard Elementary School. Esquith has written a book about what he has learned from this, called “Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56.Æ

What Esquith uses to teach his students ethical behavior is a structure for thinking; a ‘template’ to help them grasp the basis of ethical behavior and why it depends on them, based on psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s Six Levels of Moral Development.

I have adapted my own version, which helps me understand why people approve of ethical behavior when asked, yet consistently fail to put it into practice in their lives. I call it ‘The Six Stages of Ethical Understanding’.

Many people, even highly educated ones, are stuck in Stages One and Two. Many more never go beyond Stages Three and Four. None of these stages require ethical thought, since they consist in doing what others want to gain reward or approval and avoid punishment. Only in Stages Five and Six, the least common, do you encounter a need for thought, reflection and personal choice.

Forget the stick and the carrot; ignore pleasing others

No stick-and-carrot, reward-based system of ethics ever works for long, since rewards lose their value and people find ways to avoid the punishments, either by concealing what they are doing or weaseling out of the consequences. One of the reasons why greed and dishonesty have been so rampant in business in recent years—and probably always were—is that the basic business attitude encourages nothing more that this ‘don’t be found out’ approach.

Being ethical only to please those in authority, like the boss, has similar drawbacks. Rules, it’s said, are made to be broken—or, at least, evaded with the help of cunning lawyers. Information rarely makes it to the boss if a subordinate is sufficiently determined that it shall not. It also encourages others to inform on wrong-doers as a way of advancing themselves.

True ethics arises when people take the time to think and question what values count for most, what standards are needed for a civilized society and why ethics are needed in the first place. By discovering their own needs and standards, they establish principles they are far less likely to break or evade than those imposed on them by others.

It’s easy to confuse ethics and morals, but they are quite different. Morals are sets of rules, imposed from outside, like the Ten Commandments. Ethics is a process of personal exploration and thought, with the aim of discovering what ways of behaving are necessary to have the type of life you want in the the kind of society you are happy to live within. Morals are authoritarian, derived from society at large and usually restrictive (“Thou shalt not . . . ”); ethics are democratic, individual and derived from living freely (“This is what I understand to be right for me . . .”). Morals come from control by someone of greater power than you; ethics come from within.

Give me ethics every time.

Technorati Tags: corporate ethics, business ethics, morality, honesty, integrity

Why is being transparent so challenging to people?
 

All conscious, healthy relationships thrive on the basis of trust, integrity and transparency. Transparency itself is about truth-telling. That means being open, honest and sincere in putting yourself ‘out there‘. In many ways, the essence of truth-telling is being comfortable in your own skin.

Being transparent allows others to see you as you truly are. It collapses any gap between who you say you are—the face you show to the world—and your true self. The more you lack transparency, the wider that gap becomes. If this happens, other people will be suspicious and no longer trust you. They will only relate to you at arm’s length. You won’t be seen as trustworthy or credible.

Transparency seems simple, but it’s not easy for many.

If transparency has such benefits—and is so important to successful relationships—why do so many people resist it? To see further into the problem, we need an answer.

Children begin life behaving with complete transparency. They share their thoughts and express themselves without reserve. They are open about how they feel at all times. But before long, they encounter a strong message, first from their parents or immediate caregivers, then from the rest of their extended family, their teachers and other authority figures. The message is simple. Such openness is not acceptable.

“Don’t say such a thing,” adults tell them. “You’ll only cause trouble.”

The same message is repeated again and again. If you display your thoughts, feelings and beliefs openly, you risk being judged as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. To fit in, you must hide them behind a socially acceptable mask, like everyone else.

Over time, the belief becomes hardwired in your brain—a belief that transparency is too great a risk. That’s the belief most of us carry into adulthood. To be seen to have value and worth—to garner the recognition and approval we all want—you need to give up your individual voice and hide your truth, your ideas, your thoughts and your feelings. So you become quiet and passive. You tell ‘white’ lies to fit in. You try to deceive yourself and others by putting up a front to hide behind. In place of transparency, you learn to practice ’spin’.

Mired in this state of insecurity, people go through life afraid, playing the game to win approval; locked in the belief that you cannot do, think or act as yourself without risking being ridiculed and shamed.

Transparency at work.

In transactions at work, people are made to feel like children. They face policies whose actions remind them of those reactive, judgmental and critical parents who criticized them for their childish transparency. So they hold back. They give in to authority. They shut down.

Transparency becomes too scary a proposition. Most employees are reluctant to discuss their thoughts and feelings about the organization’s plans, policies or procedures. Even if what they could contribute might be important, they keep quiet. They know their input will not be welcome.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Only by being transparent—allowing your true voice and feelings to come out—will you become authentically alive and secure in your own skin. Only by fostering transparent relationships—relationships that produce trust and lead to real connection—will you be able to find the courage and steadfastness to speak your truth without being caught up in fears about what others think about you.

Transparency is the only route to knowing who you truly are. If you aren’t transparent to others, you cannot be transparent to yourself. And if you are not open to yourself—to all of yourself—you cannot mature into the complete person it is in you to become.

“You are the lens in the beam,” said former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. “You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency; your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.”

Here are this week’s questions for self reflection:

• Are people aware of the motives beneath your thoughts, words and actions. Are you?
• Can you admit it, openly, when you don’t have an answer, or feel afraid or uncomfortable?
• What stories do you use to rationalize and justify your lack of transparency?
• Does the standard of transparency by which you measure yourself differ from the standard of transparency by which you measure others?
• Do you demand openness and transparency from others, while remaining opaque yourself?
• Would you describe leaders and managers in your organization as open in their dealings with you and with one another? How does this make you feel?
• Can you envision a life where transparency is an everyday operating principle? What would that be like?

Technorati Tags: truth-telling, authenticity, transparency, being open, honesty, trust

Why taking responsibility and saying sorry is the mark of a good leader.
 

Saying sorry is one of the most difficult things that human beings can be asked to do. It’s hard enough in a family or a personal context, but in a hierarchical organization, no matter how small or informal, it’s a lot more difficult.

Why do most people so dislike apologizing? It makes their egos feel insecure to show weakness and look vulnerable. If they must do it, their usual reaction is to produce an apology that isn’t an apology at all, but a disguised power play with a hidden appeal for sympathy.

Let’s take an everyday example. You come back, tired and disheartened from a long and unsuccessful business trip. A report that you had asked to be completed during your absence isn’t ready. As your deputy or assistant now has to explain to you, another department on which you were relying has failed to come up with the information you needed. In your frustration, you explode in anger at your poor colleague, blaming everything on him or her.

The next day, with the benefit of a night’s sleep, you start to feel a bit stupid. You shouldn’t have behaved like that. So what are you going to do? You know that you ought to apologize, but your ego doesn’t want to appear weak or lose face. So you wind up bumping casually into your colleague in the corridor, and mumbling something along the lines of: “Sorry if I overreacted a bit yesterday. I realize now it wasn’t entirely your fault. But you have to understand I’d just come back from a long and frustrating trip where everything went wrong, and, to top it all, my plane was three hours late. Anyway, let’s forget about it shall we.”

It’s obvious, especially if you look at the italicized words, that this isn’t really an apology at all. It’s a self-justification. Rather than acknowledging that you behaved wrongly, it’s an attempt to put the responsibility on someone else for making you lose your temper. You should be sorry for me, it says. You should understand how much I’ve suffered. For their part, your colleague is likely to mumble something acceptable and move on. Few of us would find it very easy to demand a proper apology from the boss, especially in public.

What does this type of apology produce?

Very little. Nothing is settled. Inwardly, you still feel awkward and remorseful about your behavior, no matter how you try to justify things. Your colleague isn’t satisfied, since you’ve more or less put the responsibility onto him or her. You’ve probably done permanent damage to your relationship—and, if he or she reports what you said, perhaps to your image with others too. Until you apologize properly, the psychic tension is not going to go away.

What you need to say is something like this: “I’m really sorry for behaving like that yesterday. The fact that I was tired is no excuse. Now, is there something I can do to move things forward?”

Letting the ego take control

Part of the problem is that we live in a more and more ego-driven society, and we adopt its rules without really thinking.

The kind of person who is dominated by ego-based thinking—fearful, suspicious, aggressive, distrustful and driven by the desire for money and security—is held up as an example for us to admire and emulate. If you want to succeed, we are told, this is the model you have to follow. There is no room here for consideration of the needs of others—or even old-fashioned civility.

We’re all ‘victims’ now

Another part of the problem is that we live in a ‘society of victims’, where people compete with each other to gain sympathy and understanding. Being a victim, among other things, means never having to say you’re sorry.

Organizations are largely headed, nowadays, by weak people pretending to be strong. They are frightened, aggressive, insecure and scared to take responsibility for their mistakes, in case it reveals just how weak and vulnerable they are and gives others an advantage over them. That’s why, when things go wrong, they try to present themselves as victims.

Where you or I might see greedy and powerful people unable to acknowledge their responsibility for creating the greatest financial catastrophe of modern times, these same people look in the mirror and see themselves as mere victims of circumstances. Greedy Chief Executive Officers, who took insane risks and lied about the state of their companies, seek to portray themselves as helpless victims of a crisis that “nobody predicted”— so, of course, they have nothing to apologize for. Greedy millionaires who begged Mr. Bernard Madoff to make obscene amounts of money for them, without inquiring how he did it, now recast themselves as victims deserving of public sympathy and support.

“I admit that I’m to blame”

An apology means that you take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions, whether or not you consciously intended them. Taking responsibility—and being prepared to say sorry in a genuine way—is the act of a strong person, not a weak one. It is also part of being an adult, which is one reason why so much of today’s world looks as though it’s run by whining adolescents.

Leadership that will not accept responsibility is not leadership in any sense that I understand it. It’s not even adult behavior. Surely it’s high time for these people to grow up.

Technorati Tags: responsibility, leadership, apologizing, accountability, management essentials

Sowing the seeds of fear, doubt and mistrust

Mistrust is a fact of life in many workplaces, yet it doesn’t originate there. Mistrust is a consequence of experiences individuals have long before entering the world of work. They don’t find it in their working environments; they bring it with them.

Since trust is the single most important building block of successful relationships, rampant mistrust jeopardizes all the ways people at work relate to one another. Lacking trust, people feel unsafe. In place of co-operating or supporting one another, they disengage and keep themselves to themselves.

Many of the psycho-social and emotional dynamics at work reflect feelings that we experienced when we were growing up. We unconsciously react to colleagues, bosses and others at work who push our buttons as we once did to family members who pushed the same buttons. We project the same feelings of fear and mistrust onto the people around us today that we experienced in growing up.

Hearing voices

More than 2000 years ago, Epictetus pointed out that people are not disturbed by things themselves, but by the view they take of them. We are not born with a natural sense of distrusting others yet, long before we could spell ‘workplace’, the seeds of fear, doubt and mistrust were planted in our minds. In the early stages of our lives, we absorbed those seeds from adult voices telling us we were bad, not wanted or presented needs that were a problem. We began to feel perhaps that we weren’t safe and might not be taken care of. Hardest of all, we learned the bitter taste of betrayal.

Whatever form such messages took, they dismissed us and made us feel small. Maybe they ridiculed our clumsy efforts. Laughed at our our creations. Belittled our imagination and ideas. Dismissed our growing individuality as unimportant.

The positive voices we so wanted and needed to hear as children were probably heard much less often. For many adults, the voices of childhood were so often negative that, to this day, when they hear someone call their name they are startled, fearing another admonition.

People who grow up being told continually the ways in which they are falling short carry that fear, that doubt and that mistrust of others for the rest of their lives.

Misunderstanding the voices we hear today

How often have you interpreted or reacted to someone else’s words as if you were hearing one of these critical messages? Did the other person actually mean that? Or was your interpretation ‘off’ in some way? If you were moved to fear, doubt or mistrust, was the story you read into that person’s remarks accurate?

It’s probably fair to say that the majority of our interpretations of the words we hear are based on internalized beliefs. If, each day, you walk into your workplace feeling unworthy, unimportant or insecure, won’t you be unconsciously primed to doubt and mistrust people? Won’t it become your wiring? You’re constantly turning the radio dial in your head to a negative station and allowing preconditioned fears to direct your actions.

Finding an antidote

There are six steps you can take to discern whether fear, doubt and mistrust are justifiable. Six steps to move yourself towards building more trusting and healthy relationships.

1. Uncouple from the past. Try asking yourself if the feeling is familiar. Does it seem like a feeling that comes again and again? If so, tell yourself firmly that that was then and this is now. Detach yourself from that habitual pattern of reactivity. Take a deep breath and engage in a ‘right-here, right-now’ relationship that has no history.
2. Look to discover the rest of the story. Instead of jumping to conclusions, consider whether the story you are telling yourself is accurate. Checking out with the other person what precisely they do mean can go a long way to clarifying the situation and engendering a more trusting relationship.
3. Learn to forgive. Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Forgiving people who hurt you, maybe without even meaning to, is not condoning their behavior. It is a way to move beyond resentment. Healing best occurs when you choose to give up your bitterness and anger.
4. Explore your history around issues of doubt, fear, betrayal and trust. See if your issues are caused by learned behaviors you have been carrying with you. Explore where and when you project your emotions onto others. Are those projections justified, or are they little more than knee-jerk reactions?
5. Try talking out your problems with people whom you trust. Air your feelings. This will likely help you to gain greater clarity. It will also will allow you to express feelings which, if kept inside, will fester and rise up again, fueling yet more fear, doubt and mistrust.
6. Empathize. Everyone has limitations and blockages around trust; everyone has ‘stuff’ they carry about with them. Other people’s fears and doubts , like yours, are more often than not projections they put on you. Communicating with empathy, understanding and compassion will go a long way to forging healthier and more positive relationships.

Technorati Tags: trust, fear, mistrust, doubt, misunderstanding others, living in the past, empathy

Sometimes you have to go counter to what you were taught
 

Photo by Frankh

Leaders often look for lessons and experiences to help them navigate uncertain circumstances. Most frequently base their actions on a combination of past knowledge, homespun wisdom and instincts which have been formed over a lifetime of personal and professional experiences. Like many of my peers, in the course of my career, I have had to rely on these things many, many times. I have also learned that there are times where you must go against your instincts and past conditioning to make the progress you seek.

Relying on the past produces management myths: sayings, beliefs and stories that contain, not wisdom, but ideas long outdated and techniques that are accorded honor they don’t deserve. Thinking through the most common myths instead of accepting them without question—then letting go those that can’t stand up to demands for rational proof—might well improve your interactions with co-workers, clients, consultants and others that you come across in the course of your daily business. You don’t need outdated ideas. You don’t need proverbial ‘wisdom’ that is plain wrong. Many of the most common management ideas have only become ‘normal’ because they’ve been so often repeated without thought.

Myth 1: Trust must be earned

For example, the old adage “trust must be earned” is one which most of us grow up hearing. As children, we are told “don’t trust strangers” and later in life we carry that skepticism with us, impinging, or at a minimum delaying, our ability to get close to those that we come in contact with in our professional dealings.

I live by a modified version of this adage within my career: “trust must be unearned”. Under this approach, I believe that I am able to encourage a results-oriented mindset, allowing my collaborators to buy-in to our mutually agreed goals; and in the spirit of achieving positive results “faster, better and cheaper”, create teams which start from a position of trust and are able to move quickly from ideas to results.

I don’t suggest that this always works—it does not. However, I have found that people respect an approach such as this, and more often than not, rise to the occasion. Furthermore, nothing seems to engender trust amongst team members more than collective success, recognition and reward. Remember, as a boss, you’re the single most important factor in whether your team has high productivity and high morale. This approach allows you to use your influence as a leader to achieve outcomes.

Myth 2: Admitting you don’t know will lower your credibility

One of the challenges with teams (especially new teams) is that many people view asking for help as a sign of weakness. For them, doing so publicly demonstrates that they don’t understand the issue being discussed. In any meetings that I host, or presentations that I give, I always encourage questions right at the outset and let the audience know that to me, asking questions is a sign of strength and leads to better, clearer communications.

My sense is that if one person has a question, chances are very high that others have the very same question. In fact, when I myself am in the audience, be it a highly attended meeting or a one-on-one meeting with a client, prospect or peer, I make sure to ask for any clarifications that I need. I don’t let fear of others’ perceptions of me or my inquiry dictate my level of understanding. Even more, I have come to believe and frequently state that “my ignorance is my greatest asset”. I learned this concept when discussing my business with an “outsider” that I had just met. I now see that someone’s “blissful ignorance” permits them to ask questions without constraint or influence of embedded paradigms.

It is clear to see that my oft-mentioned focus on outcomes has the ability to modify our way of thinking or understanding of long-held beliefs or instinctive behaviors. Generally speaking, when I engage a new team, say an internal team tasked with achieving some organizational objective, or encounter a new client opportunity, I find that deploying these approaches trusting immediately and asking lots of questions—leads to improved performance. It does leave one vulnerable to being taken advantage of or appearing ignorant; but my experience indicates that the risk-reward trade-off is favorable in the long run.

Technorati Tags: leadership, trust, team building, communication, asking questions, admitting your ignorance, helping others

Does your behavior foster or limit trust?
 

“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All of life is lived in relationship—even life at work. That’s why the most critical building block of any team is trust. Without trust, teams are disparate collections of individuals and groups; and the element that creates or erodes trust—and thus builds or destroys teams—is your individual behavior as a leader. Trust can support teams to go the extra mile, work for the greater good of the team and the organization, foster open and honest communication and engender mutual respect and support. Distrust often stems from a ‘me first’ mind-set that leads to conflict, egoism, and a going-through-the-motions attitude.

The statement, “There is no ‘I’ in team” may be trite and worn, yet it’s a fact of life at work. When trust is lacking among team members, they spend inordinate amounts of time and energy resisting others’ behaviors, reacting to others’ disingenuousness, playing politics and generally feeling reluctant to ask for, or give, support.

How might you be contributing to mistrust on your team?

In a culture characterized by mistrust, relationships quickly suffer. When relationships suffer, performance, production and profits decline just as rapidly. Check out these 30 leadership behaviors that are guaranteed to create mistrust within any team:

1. As leader, you fail to keep your promises, violate agreements and ignore commitments.
2. You look after yourself first and others only when it is convenient.
3. You micromanage and resist delegating.
4. You demonstrate inconsistency between what you say and how you behave.
5. You fail to share critical information with your team and your colleagues.
6. You choose to not tell the truth.
7. You resort to blaming and scapegoating others rather than own up to your mistakes.
8. You judge and criticize rather than offer constructive feedback.
9. You betray confidences, gossip and talk about others behind their backs.
10. You choose to not allow others to contribute or make decisions.
11. You downplay others’ talents, knowledge and skills.
12. You refuse to support others with their professional development.
13. You resist creating shared values, expectations and intentions in favor of your pursuing own agenda.
14. You refuse to compromise and foster win-lose arguments.
15. You constantly remind everyone of your status and make it clear that you will not be questioned or criticized without inflicting punishment in return.
16. You refuse to be held accountable by your colleagues or subordinates.
17. You resist accepting your vulnerability, hide your weaknesses and won’t admit you find anything a challenge.
18. You practice sarcasm and put-down humor and rationalize off-putting remarks as “good for the group”.
19. You fail to admit you need support and prefer to mess up rather than ask anyone for help.
20. You take others’ suggestions and critiques as personal attacks.
21. You fail to encourage openness in team meetings and allow others to avoid contributing constructively.
22. You refuse to consider the idea of constructive conflict. In fact, you usually avoid conflict at all costs.
23. You consistently hijack team meetings and move them to your personal agenda.
24. You either ignore or fail to follow through on decisions agreed at team meetings.
25. You secretly engage in back-door negotiations with favored team members to create cliques and political alliances.
26. You refuse to give others the benefit of the doubt.
27. You judge people without allowing them to explain their position or actions and won’t reverse incorrect decisions.
28. You refuse to apologize for mistakes or misunderstandings.
29. You use your position to indulge in inappropriate behavior.
30. When things go wrong, your first response always to defend yourself and protect your reputation.

When you show up in integrity, behave ethically and allow your vulnerability, others will see you as genuine, warts and all. Only when that happens will your teammates begin to trust you. You will have created a personal ‘container of safety’ in which others feel they can relate to you in an equally genuine fashion.

Communication and true teamwork is a function of trust, not technique. When trust is high, communication becomes effortless. Communicating and relating are instantaneous. When trust is low, communicating and relating are effortful, exhausting and very demanding of time and energy—if they take place at all. No one wants to give 100% to someone they can’t trust. Only when you demonstrate that you trust others will those around you see you as trustworthy enough to share their thoughts and insights in full.

Your $10 food-for-thought questions this week are:

• How deeply do you trust your own people? Do you trust that they are working to do what’s best for you?
• Are you trustworthy? What does trust mean to you? What is your notion of trust?
• Do you often find yourself needing to be in control? Do you have a lot of rules that have to be met before you trust someone?
• Do you feel the people in your life should think, feel and behave as you do? What does someone have to do for you not to trust them?
• Are fear, doubt and anxiety a large part of your life? Where or when do you feel not good enough or not worthy enough?
• Why is trust easy or difficult for you? What would your life be like if you substituted trust for fear?
• Would you describe yourself as one who has a well-honed capacity to trust, be non-judgmental, and compassionate? Would people describe you as a good listener? How do you know?
• Have you ever been told, directly or indirectly, that you can’t be trusted? If so, what was that like?

“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.” ­ Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War under President Roosevelt

Technorati Tags: leadership, trust, honesty, openness, creating trust, team-building, ethics, honesty

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

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Keys to Work/Life Balance
• Nine out of 10 say they are bullied at work
• Pay attention when you work for me!

Leadership Should Create Meaning, Not Destroy It
 

Most of us have learned to suspect the motives of management because we’ve been fooled before.All the fine words about valuing people and wanting to preserve employment aren’t matched by actions when things get tough. The first action of those same executives is too often to save their own fat salaries and bonuses by laying off thousands of ordinary people. No one likes to feel duped—still less to be duped repeatedly.

Leadership creates meaning—or should do. It should act in ways that bring a sense of shared purpose and direction to the whole organization. You cannot do that when those beneath you know they will be sacrificed the minute their presence begins to threaten the earnings of the top guys. When that happens, what you get is meaninglessness: the feeling that neither you, nor the job you do, count for anything; that you are totally expendable at any moment.

Integrity can be seen

When leaders the time to work out the right thing to do, then do it with courage and honesty, people will trust them. Integrity isn’t some vague abstraction; you can see it wherever words and actions match up and honesty is chosen over deceit without hesitation.

It is a matter of values. If you truly value integrity, you will accept losing rather than compromise your honesty. If you value winning at any cost—as we have been taught to do by the unscrupulous and macho pseudo-leaders of the recent past—how you play the game wonʼt matter, so long as you win. If dishonesty works and costs less, why choose any other path?

So can manipulation

Manipulation is rampant today. People just about always interpret it as dishonesty and react accordingly. It’s said there are three statements in this world that are never true:

• My check is in the mail.
• Of course I’m not simply trying to get you into bed with me.
• As your manager, I’m here to help you.

Too many management fads and fashionable techniques are just thinly-disguised ways of manipulating people to do what you want, when it’s not in their personal interests to do so.

Macho management, of course, is highly manipulative, as well as brutal and bullying. Its rhetoric may be full of appeals to heroic sentiments, but it is always about getting people to work harder and faster to benefit others—mostly the executives of the business and the shareholders: those who main source of income comes either directly from returns on share capital, or indirectly from the same source via incentives linked to increases in share valuation.

The destruction of meaning

We all crave something to believe in. Yet it isn’t the case that any meaning will do. Meaning needs to be based on values we can trust; on stories that inspire, not tales of trickery and deceit or examples of outright bullying. Integrity produces meaning because it is transparent and can be trusted. Manipulation destroys it, because it relies on deceit and hidden agendas.

Too many of the leaders and managers of the recent past have built their careers on acting tough, critical, and intimidating, seeking the quickest way make the biggest profits, regardless of who gets hurt. When a manager threatens people or makes it clear they will suffer if they don’t do this or that, employees usually do what is asked—even if it isn’t anything they believe in, or it makes no sense to them. Some of today’s organizations are such horrible places to work that brute force is probably the only way to get anything done.

Without meaning, there can be no motivation other than fear. Employees become little better than slaves, doing what their masters demand without question. Resentment rises. People leave as soon as they can. Work becomes nothing more than a financial necessity —something that should have died out along with steam-powered factories, smog-laden air, and all the similar signs of early industrialization.

There is a way out

The cure for manipulative management is simple to state, but harder to achieve. You must do the right thing for one reason only: because it’s the right thing to do. Leaders have ethical duties as well as all the others, and many management decisions are as much moral as economic. Many managers ignore this and try to absolve themselves from their ethical responsibilities by portraying every business decision as merely pragmatic. This cannot be done honestly. Life is a series of ethical choices, no less in business than anywhere else.

Technorati Tags: business ethics, manipulative management, leadership, integrity, trust, authenticity, meaning

Related articles by Zemanta

• Authentic Leadership
• 8 Steps to Charismatic Leadership
• It’s Our Ship: Book Review
• The Six Pillars of Character

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

Related articles by Zemanta

• Steven G. Brant: Capitalism Is Dead. Now What Do We Do?
• Daniel J. H. Greenwood: Making or Taking?
• Warren Goldstein: “Free Market?” R.I.P. and Good Riddance!

Why the problems of Wall Street are only symptoms
 

I’m sure, like me, you’re drowning in reports, debates, opinions, treatises, articles and sound bites about recent events on Wall Street.

While most of these have focused on issues of financial credit, commercial paper, stocks, mortgages, the housing crisis, executive greed and the like, what shouts out at me is a deeper issue—an erosion of trust leading to a systemic breakdown in relationships.

There was a time when a loan or mortgage was processed between two individuals, a banker and a borrower. It resulted in a long-term working relationship demanding trust, transparency and honesty. Today, this lending relationship—along with most others—has morphed into a fragmented process: what was once a meeting of individuals has become a soulless transaction involving numerous players, each of whom exercises their function for a brief period, then moves on; and none of whom have the time or inclination to treat any of the others as real, flesh-and-blood human beings.

As Joan Borysenko writes: “We cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch.” Without relationships, little is left that can serve as the basis for on-going trust.

From Wall Street to Main Street

What has been happening on Wall Street is also happening on Main Street. The dynamic we have come to know as ‘relationship’ is disintegrating, replaced by a connection or transaction, most often based on superficial, fleeting contacts characterized by distance and impersonal channels. Whether that contact comes through e-mail, cellphone, Blackberry, Twitter, social networking sites or texting, this electronic connection is devoid of direct, personal contact. There’s no face-to-face interaction, so emotional connection is lost.

With that loss, trust erodes. You no longer have to face the person you’re dealing with; look in his or her eyes and become aware of human contact at an emotional level. And as relationships shift into impersonal modes, untrustworthy behavior gets easier. Telling a bare-faced lie over the telephone or via e-mail is far simpler and more tempting than trying to carry it off in a face-to-face meeting.

Relationships that produce openness and trust can only be cultivated when all parties experience an emotional ‘safe zone’. That’s why, when relationships are replaced by “electronic” interactions and transactions, emotional connection—the human factor that creates true relationships—goes missing; along with feelings of warmth and friendship towards the other person: what marriage researcher John Gottman says is the definitive foundational element that determines the sustainability of relationships. When there is no emotional connection, there is no friendship. No friendship, no trust. No trust, no honesty, no transparency, no truth-telling.

Emotional connection is blocked by transmission through the ether

The ether through which electronic connections are made—whether with banks, other businesses, our loved ones or friends and colleagues—cannot transmit this ‘safe zone’ or generate feelings of trustworthiness. The major unintended consequence of all our ‘separation by electronics’ is the erosion of genuine human contact. Without it, so-called relationships become mere temporary linkings of convenience, as easily broken off as established.

Within an electronic, transactional world, more and more people may be connecting, but fewer and fewer folks are relating. We may live in an increasingly inter-connected world, but we are experiencing a far less inter-related one. Thanks to the fragmentation of relationships—one major consequence of living in such a culture—human contact is more likely to be limited to a phone call, an e-mail, or a quick “cu” text message. This is a poor substitute for real conversation and authentic dealings with another human being. It’s questionable whether it represents actual contact at all.

The disintegrating relationships on Wall Street and Main Street are symptomatic of a greater threat and challenge—one based on living in a world where all this superficial inter-connecting is replacing deeper inter-relating. Even as it becomes easier than ever to stay ‘in touch’, our capacity actually to touch one another—physically or emotionally—is slipping away. No wonder the willingness to trust is failing as well.

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• How many people do you deal with personally after the initial contact. Do you ‘hand them off’ to others? Are you available to them personally if they want to contact you later on?
• Do you establish actual relationships with colleagues, co-workers and clients? How about your children? Do you ever view direct contact with others as an irritant or a distraction? Do you prefer to connect with people at arm’s length?
• What is your preferred mode of communicating at work—in person or by electronic device (even when in-person is very do-able)?
• How would you describe the nature of your relationships at work: ‘connecting’ or ‘relating’? What would others say about you?
• How many chairs in your home actually face one another? How often do you have face-to-face conversations with each other as opposed to ’snippets’ sitting side by side while watching TV, reading the paper or handling some business document? When you and your family sit down for meals, is the cell phone also a required utensil?
• When you are with others, do they spend more time looking at some electronic device than they do engaged in meaningful conversation with you and each other? What about you? Is your cell phone or BlackBerry with you at every moment?

Technorati Tags: relationships, communication, human contact, trust, being face-to-face, establishing trust, listening, being available