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

How to renew yourself as a leader (Part 2)

 
Many leaders—I’m tempted to write ‘most leaders’—don’t trust those who work for them to do what they’re paid to do and do it properly. The continual primacy of command-and-control methods of leadership proves this.

There’s a whole management mythology out there to support the idea that people are basically lazy and feckless. If you aren’t on top of them the whole time, they’ll slack off and try to avoid working. That’s in addition to the ego-centric belief many leaders have that nobody can do anything as well as them, let alone better; and all the anal-obsessive bosses out there who think ‘leadership’ and ‘micro-management’ are the same thing.

Trust, in today’s workplaces, is more of an endangered species than any giant panda or rare, South American frog. No one amongst the great and mighty, it seems, is even remotely interested in its survival. Read the full story

Helen Major wonders how to deal with what seems at first to be mutual antipathy

We are delighted to welcome Helen Major as the latest guest author on Slow Leadership. This is her first article for us.

“We noticed that there were babies that we were drawn to and babies we didn’t like. Each of us had our favorites. There was no rhyme or reason for it; the babies were only days old and totally helpless. And the baby one of us found unattractive, another nurse would find adorable, so it evened out.”

That quotation is from my mother. Her experiences as a supervisor and instructor in Pediatric Nursing at St. Mary’s hospital during the early years of the Baby Boom convinced her that favoritism is innate and unaccountable. My mother believes that if helpless infants (whose appearance, cries, and capabilities are absolutely innocent, innate, and equal) attract or repel professional caregivers in a neonate nursery, then favoritism must be hard wired in humans.

I have been mulling this over the last few months, having inherited my predecessor’s staff and discovering that his favorites are not necessarily mine. My team includes a talented and abrasive employee who introduced herself to me by saying she didn’t trust me and didn’t want to work with me. Since she had no previous experience with me or contact with any one I have worked with over the years, it has seemed to me that she just didn’t like me on sight and I found I returned the favor. Interactions between us have been consistently strained, and I found myself communicating with her only when it was unavoidable. It came to a head last month when she accused me of ignoring her and favoring other members of the team. Read the full story

Why values matter despite the way leaders misunderstand and misuse them

Photo: Adrian Scottow

We hear a lot today about values: ‘family values’, ‘traditional values’, ‘conservative values’, ‘liberal values’ — even corporate values. ‘Values-based leadership’ has become another in the long line of panaceas to solve the problems of corporate under-performance.

But what are values? Do you have them all along, learn them somehow, or choose them like you might choose a club to join or a coat to wear? Are they a tool to be used or something fundamental about each person — to be tampered with at your peril?

Values are beliefs of a special kind: beliefs that come with a large emotional charge attached to them. Our individual values are the origin and location of our sense of who we are. They matter because we feel, deep down, that they do. Heart and head are not necessarily aligned when it comes to ideas. It’s pretty easy to fill people’s heads with notions, opinions and fantasies. The media, advertisers and politicians do it every day! We pick up all kinds of thoughts with little care for what we’re doing. Fortunately, we drop most of them just as easily. Yet while we may pick up a belief of any other type almost as casually — and put it down as easily — our values quickly become part of us.

Values and emotions are totally intertwined. So are values and behavior. In many ways, behavior is driven by values. Whenever you do something “because it’s right” you’re acting on your values. They define you in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Changing or abandoning your values is tough and painful business. Most people never do it throughout their lives. Those who do experience it as transformative, whether for good or evil. Read the full story

Why we are suffering for decades of free-market business fundamentalism

Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice, London
Photo: Wikimedia

One of my favorite columnists is Simon Caulkin, management editor for Britain’s Guardian and Observer newspapers. Not only is he a powerful writer and iconoclastic thinker, he has the knack of getting to the heart of many of the problems that are currently screwing up the global economy.

One such is the current financial crisis: a product of more than a decade of corporate greed and regulators unwilling to intervene to prevent the kind of boom and bust that enriches a few and leaves the majority paying the bill (“Capitalism’s too important to be left to capitalists”).

Here’s Caulkin at his best, fulminating against injustice like a hell-fire preacher weighing in against sin:

What do the following have in common: sub-prime mortgages; collateralised debt obligations and other instruments by which those mortgages are sliced, diced and sold on; and excessive leverage, whether by banks, private equity or hedge funds? They are all reckless and conscious mis-selling, the product of an amoral, deterministic system that expects and gives individuals the incentive to maximise their gains, while barring them from taking into account the costs their profit-making imposes on society as a whole.

I suspect he’s right about this. The so-called free market is out of hand. By demanding total freedom for the strong to benefit, even if it means the weak will suffer, it offends against just about every tenet of civilized behavior. Worse, it seems bent on destroying the very basis of all commerce: trust. Read the full story

Holding too many meetings destroys people’s faith in their manager and their colleagues

In the list of activities that waste time and cause worthless frustration at work, meetings rank very near the top. Not only do many meetings fail to result in any clear decision, leaving you wondering why people came together in the first place, others have no discernible purpose at all. Worst of all, holding too many meetings passes a strong message: the boss doesn’t trust the team to function without his or her constant interference; and colleagues don’t trust one another not to undermine them in some way.

Some people spend most of their working days in meetings of one kind or another. The only time available to do their own work is either very early in the morning, before the first meeting is scheduled, or late in the evening when they should be relaxing at home. There are briefing meetings, liaison meetings, working parties, project groups and a host of other meeting types; and while all offer endless opportunities to drone on about something of little importance to anyone else, the worst aspect of so many useless gatherings is their tendency to create situations where your work can be vetoed or undermined — whether that’s by the boss (who has enough opportunities to do this already) or various colleagues. Read the full story

Authentic communication, the cornerstone of all trusting relationships, requires far more than speaking the truth

 
In the words of the old song: “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it.” The words you use, the tone of voice, the circumstances in which the ‘message’ is passed — even your facial expressions and body language — can all be used to create a false picture in the other person’s mind; one that will give your words a different meaning from their face value. When this happens, your hearers (or readers) are as thoroughly mislead as they would be if every word of what you said or wrote were untrue. Read the full story