What does it mean?

Today’s management approaches are all abstractions and no humanity

Hamburger Management has a spreadsheet in place of a heart and a profit-and-loss statement for a soul. Is it any wonder that is has to resort to violent, artificial means of motivating people? Giving huge rewards to a chosen few and driving the rest by threats and intimidation isn’t motivation. Nor is using smart sound-bites and slogans. There is only one way to fill people with joy in what they do and bring out their highest abilities—and that way hasn’t changed since the human race began.

Motivation is the subject of more articles and training courses than almost any other management “technique.” Yet I’m constantly appalled at the nonsense that I see written and handed out on the topic. Mostly, Hamburger Management ignores the purely human aspects of the enterprise, preferring to focus on spreadsheets, ratios, and results. It does notice motivation however—mostly, I suspect, because that seems to offer a way of getting people to work harder for the same pay or even less. Hamburger Managers are expected to motivate their people,
often by standing behind them wielding a big stick. If that doesn’t work, they stand just ahead, waving a large carrot and shifting it just out of reach each time their people get close enough to feel they might be able to get their hands on it.

This kind of artificial, carrot-and-stick motivation is a potent cause of workplace stress. It’s as if you’re in a car driven by someone who accelerates madly whenever there’s some space ahead, then stands on the brakes when they seem about to throw you headlong into something. It doesn’t make for a relaxing ride, and it’s hell on the brakes and the tires. Yet that’s the atmosphere in many organizations today: a scary ride mixing being forced to drive way too fast with suddenly being dragged to a halt when the organization decides it can’t afford what it will take to make you keep up the constant acceleration.

What all this sham motivation misses is what truly makes people love their jobs.

Meaning

People only care deeply about what they do when it gives their lives meaning and purpose. They don’t really work for money, they work for what money means to them: security, good food, pleasure, status, fun, relaxation. They don’t respond to incentives, they respond to what the incentives mean in their lives: praise, recognition, self-worth, and a sense of value from achievement. Even punishment and threats only work when they truly mean humiliation, loss, or sharp, personal pain.

Managers who ignore this haven’t a hope of producing anything but the minimum effort.

Part of something wonderful

True motivation means giving people something real to care about—lasting values like truth, friendship, honor, loyalty, justice, love, and self-worth. It means letting them see why they’re doing what they’re asked to do, and how it will contribute to something they find worthwhile. Of course people want personal success and rewards. But few want these things at any price. Instead, the vast majority of folk give the highest value to the feeling that they are part of something wonderful. They want to believe that the world (or, at least, the part of it that they inhabit) cares about and values what they do.

They also want to feel that the organization cares about them. Slowing down gives leaders time to explain the meaning of the work, to show its value. It also lets them that show that they care about their people.

Blood, sweat, and tears

When someone truly cares about us, we almost automatically start to care about them. All the great leaders of the past have known this. Napoleon talked personally with his soldiers and handed out medals to show them that he cared about their hurts and valued their bravery. They responded by fighting for him until the last. Winston Churchill walked in the bombed ruins of London and spoke the words the defiant people would have spoken if they’d had his eloquence. He didn’t talk about abstractions, like overall war plans or strategic objectives. He spoke about real things: blood, sweat and tears. He embodied the values the nation was fighting for. He gave meaning to people’s efforts to stay alive and fight back.

Hand people instructions and they’ll do no more than you tell them to—and maybe not even that. Give them rules and they’ll find ways around them. Talk about financial ratios, profitability, and return on investment, and their eyes will glaze over. But give people something to believe in—a sense of meaning and purpose in what they do— and show them that they matter, and they’ll produce efforts and results you wouldn’t have imagined possible.

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Technorati tags: motivation meaning caring leadership slow leadership

News and Views: April 28th 2007

A phony war for talent?

Steve Roesler has a provocative and thoughtful piece in which he doubts the current media frenzy about a “War for Talent” and a “Generation Gap” represents very much of the reality of what is facing organizations. As he points out, organizations are, as usual, keen to locate the reason for any shortages of suitable staff “out there” somewhere. The reality, in his view, is that the problem is internal, based on defective management attitudes, too much workplace stress, pervasive anxiety pushing people to leave the corporate world, and organizational failure to address practical problems that block the flow of what talent there is. Worth thinking about. [link]
then

Have you paid your dues?

Penelope Trunk is typically outspoken and combative on the subject of people needing to “pay their dues” in the lower and middle reaches of an organization to reach the top after 40 years or so. She amasses a fine range of expert opinion to debunk the whole idea that buying some kind of ticket to the top by submitting to a soul-crushing grind of 80-hour weeks is anything worth aspiring to. Hard to disagree. [link]

Shut up and let me fail!

Hamburger Management treats communication as a one-way street. Your arrogant, macho boss tells you what to do and shouts at you for not doing it fast enough. You (the hapless subordinate) must keep your mouth shut and do as you are told, or suffer even more abuse. This piece does a great job of explaining why an approach such as this is about the best possible way to ensure that your project or business strategy will be a complete failure. [link]

More wise words about the war for talent

Here’s Bob Sutton laying into some of the total rubbish being spread around about how to deal with the (self-created) talent gaps that have started to make organizations take notice. His firm statement that so-called “management superstars” are grossly overrated (and overpaid) is enough by itself to make the piece worth reading. [link]

How to make more time for what matters

Do you need some sound advice on how to take back control of your attention and stop allowing it to be frittered away by a mass of pointless distraction? Whenever people tell me that they don’t have time to get their work done during normal hours, I know without asking that they are either wasting much of that time on distraction and pointless activities, or allowing it to be hijacked by meaningless and unnecessary meetings. If you follow this advice, you'll be surprised how much empty time you will find for the things that really matter. [link] [via]

Outsourcing: more hype than substance?

Most management fads and fashions turn out to be based on snake-oil. Outsourcing, it seems, is already showing unexpected drawbacks. According to new research, far from saving organizations money, IT and business processing outsourcing deals end up costing them far more than the work would have done had it been kept in-house; while as many as two thirds of large outsourcing contracts start to fall apart before the end of their contract terms. Not surprisingly, the only people to make real money out of outsourcing were the people actively pushing the idea: the consultants. [link]

The best place to look for thieves and cheats is . . . in the boardroom!

Research is backing up what I have been saying for some time: macho leaders risk losing any sense of ethics or morality. If that happens, they find it easy to abuse their positions for their own personal gain. A study by accountancy firm KPMG Forensic found that the typical company fraudster is a trusted male executive, sometimes even the chief executive, who will carry out as many as 20 acts of serious fraud over a period of up to five years or more. Makes you feel your trust in the guys at the top is justified, doesn’t it? I guess that loyalty, like communication, is one-way in the realm of Hamburger Management. [link]

Forget balance, try L-O-V-E

Here's Lisa Earle McLeod arguing that work-life balance is a fundamentally flawed concept. She wants us all to focus on “the four-letter word that is the real secret of success—L-O-V-E.” No, she's not trying to harken back to the 1960s and “flower power.” She wants us all to truly love what we do and know that we’re making a contribution that matters. If that means changing your job, do it. [link]

Working until you drop?

Since most of us are living longer, healthier, and more active lives, governments have not been slow to spot the potential for higher tax revenues and less pressure on social security if people can be persuaded to work well past normal retirement age. Mirko Bagaric thinks we should go on working for most of our lives. Not to please the government, but to maintain our psychic well-being. Read this piece to see if he convinces you. [link]

Is a work/personal life balance even possible?

Is work is creeping into your personal life? Are you missing out on family events and the support of your friends due to your work schedule? Are you trying to keep your work and non-work lives separate and in their right place? Dumb Little Man offers some practical tips. [link] [via]

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The Obsessive/Compulsive Organization

The final part of a series on the illnesses of today’s organizational cultures

The obsessive/compulsive organization appears to be highly efficient from the outside, with a clearly-focused strategy and tight internal controls and procedures. However, like individuals who suffer from obsessive/compulsive disorder, all that strict control has gotten out of hand, resulting in a morass of rule-bound bureaucracy. Whenever that happens, an organization becomes incapable of reponding flexibly to the world. Following the rules is everything, even if it results in crippled performance.

Our modern-day fashion for exalting measurement as the pinnacle of management has brought us probably more organizations suffering from an obsessive/compulsive outlook than any of the other disorders of organizational culture. Most of them display some degree of “paralysis by analysis.” Their leaders have big spreadsheets and small hearts—and sometimes small brains too. Instead of management being an art, linked to the ever-changing needs of a community of individuals, it is treated as a pseudo-science of numbers and rules.

Obsessive/compulsive organizations delight in a “command-and-control“ format for leadership. Control matters more than anything else. Ever heard the saying: “What cannot be measured, cannot be controlled?” That was an obsessive/compusive organizational leader speaking. Organizations and leaders of this type seek to control every aspect of their internal and external environments, producing in the process truckloads of rule books, mountains of procedure manuals, forests of printed instructions, acres of complex analyses, Powerpoint presentations without end, and boundless deserts of policy guidelines. Nothing must be left to chance. Every action must be laid down precisely, then checked constantly by measurements or direct observation. Being a boss in an obsessive/compulsive organization is more like being a tax auditor than a business person, a mentor, or a coach.

You can recognize an obsessive/compulsive organization like this:

• There will be a rigid and closely-defined sets of rules for everything, backed up with elaborate measurements, complex information systems, and exhaustive evaluations.
• Management will have become ritualized into pre-set actions, based on complicated systems of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting that cover nearly every aspect of the organization’s functioning.
• Much of what is checked and reported on will appear trivial at best, pointless at worst.
• Compliance with procedures and guidelines is unquestioned. Non-compliance is a mortal sin.
• The organization will have a clear, focused strategy, yet will base it on a narrow, single theme, such as cost-cutting or measuring financial ratios—often to the total exclusion of any other factors.
• “Command-and-control” will be the habitual form of leadership.
• In an organization like this, your status and power depend on your position in the—complex and rigid —hierarchy. All relationships aree highly formalized and subject to status.
• Everyone will be permanently anxious, in case they have offended against some unexpected rule or procedure. Since there are so many rules, knowing them all and ensuring total compliance will probably be impossible, but that will not be accepted as an excuse.
• No one will trust anyone. In place of trust, bosses demand strict compliance with pre-set rules. Then they will check up on every action and measure every outcome, because they don’t trust their people to comply either.

Working in an obsessive/compulsive organization reduces you to being an impersonal cog in a huge, bureaucratic machine. Forget about spontaneity or flexibility. Such a rigid organization will continue to resist change long after it has become clear that it is bleeding money and destined for the scrap heap. Since its managers have never been allowed to exercise personal judgment, the very idea of change or accountability will probably terrify most of them.

The other organizational “personality disorders” in this short series produce leaders who display pathological anger, suspicion, callousness, cruelty, and arrogance. In the obsessive/compulsive organization, leaders are coldly detached, formal, and distant, more interested in tracking their ratios and measurements than in human beings. Only rebellion is treated harshly. For the rest, the boss is likely to be no more than the current person who issues orders. If you comply, all will be well. If you don’t, or your statistical performance measurements are below par, even your discipline and dismissal will be handled through impersonal procedures.

Burnout in obsessive/compulsive organizations is rare. Since there is no scope for initiative, there is little demand (or opportunity) for workaholism. Stress, however, is everywhere, driven by the constant measurements, the suffocating control, and the mindless obsession with following every tiny rule. People in this type of organization usually display an odd mixture of anxiety and passivity: they worry about minutiae, but feel helpless to make any change. When the market shifts significantly, the organization continues on its chosen course, heedless of the change, until, like a tortoise in the middle of the road, it fails to avoid what is coming and is quickly squashed.

If you just want a salary, with no demands on you for anything beyond submission and obedience, an obsessive/compulsive organization offers some attraction. Though the rules lock you in iron bands, they also protect you. Compliance absolves you of all responsibility for the outcome. Strict procedures for managing people make sure that you will not be treated according to the whims of an individual boss. If you do your set work conscientiously, the constant measurement should not be a problem. Just don’t expect to be able to express any creativity or individualism. Nor to be able to change anything.

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Technorati tags: corporate culture command-and-control management by numbers rule-bound organizations obsessive leadership

The Narcissistic Organization

Part 3 of a series on the illnesses of today’s organizational cultures

A narcissistic organization suffers from delusions of success and grandeur. From the outside, the organization probably seems to be nothing unusual. From the inside, in its own estimation, it can do nothing wrong. Every problem or setback is attributed to external situations beyond anyone’s control. Its leaders are portrayed as near geniuses and their every action or speech eagerly reported. Employees are expected to become cult-like in their devotion to the enterprise. So distorted does this kind of sick organization’s view of the world become that it eventually loses touch with reality. Many of the strategic mistakes and failures that seem so obvious to outsiders occur in organizations that suffer from narcissism.

Narcissism is especially prevalent in long-established organizations with a past track-record of success. They become so proud of their past, and so complacent about their prestige, that they no longer notice clear signs of pending problems and an obvious need for change. Just as psychotic organizations “breed” psychotic leaders, narcissistic organizations tend to have an unusually high proportion of narcissistic leaders fixated on issues of power, status, prestige, and superiority.

Here is how Professor Manfred Kets de Vries, writing in The European Management Journal (Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 183–200, April 2004), describes the “reactive” (i.e. negative) narcissistic leader:

Reactive narcissistic leaders are not prepared to share power. On the contrary, as leaders they surround themselves with ‘yea-sayers.’ Unwilling to tolerate disagreement and dealing poorly with criticism, such leaders rarely consult with colleagues, preferring to make all decisions on their own. When they do consult with others, such consultation is little more than ritualistic. They use others as a kind of ‘Greek chorus,’ expecting followers to agree to whatever they suggest. Reactive narcissistic leaders learn little from defeat. When setbacks occur, such leaders don’t take any personal responsibility; instead, they scapegoat others in the organization, passing on the blame. Even when things are going well, they can be cruel and verbally abusive to their subordinates, and they are prone to outbursts of rage when things don’t go their way. Likewise, perceiving a personal attack even where none is intended, they may erupt when followers rebel against their distorted view of the world. Such ‘tantrums,’ re-enactments of childhood behavior, originate in earlier feelings of helplessness and humiliation. Given the power that such leaders now hold, the impact of their rage on their immediate environment can be devastating. Furthermore, tantrums intimidate followers, who then themselves regress to more childlike behavior.

How can you spot a narcissistic organization? Here are some clues:

• The members of the top leadership are revered and accorded almost god-like status.
• Employees treat the organizationally-approved way of thinking or acting as Holy Writ.
• No one ever admits to any mistakes. Problems are always blamed on someone else—often people outside the organization.
• People treat the bombastic, dictatorial behavior of certain bosses as justified by their exceptional status.
• Questioning any aspect of the organization is strongly discouraged. Objections to policy or procedures from outsiders are met by an amused and superior smile.
• Obtaining employment within the organization is seen as a life-changing achievement and a gift of immeasurable value, which must be repaid with unquestioning loyalty.

My own experience of narcissistic organizations confirms how easily they become a mutual admiration society, where employees act as if simply being part of the organization confers automatic superiority; and the leaders are more concerned to polish their image than take tough decisions. Such an idealized view of themselves and their organization quickly seduces executives into believing that they are in truth the wonderful managers and flawless business strategists that the organization’s PR has made them out to be.

One of the most negative aspects of working in a narcissistic organization is the way it forces everyone to take sides. Since narcissistic leaders typically show strong hostility to anyone who fails to give them the unquestioning loyalty to which they believe they are entitled, employees are faced with a stark choice: do what the leader wants or suffer nasty career consequences. Worse still, there will be no support from colleagues for any “rebellion.” As organizational “cult members,” people rapidly become like their leaders: deeply hostile to anyone who questions the prevailing organizational culture. Independent thought is squashed. Leaders are deprived of truthful feedback. The self-satisfied blindness that results can lead to catastrophe, as leaders are deprived of sensible reality-testing and followers provide sycophantic praise for personal gain. As Max McKeown wrote recently in Management Issues:

Far too many organizations are stuffed with sycophants prepared to overlook anything shady, illegal, or unethical as long as they are getting to hang around and share some power.

Narcissistic organizations breed arrogant, power-obsessed leaders and sycophantic, manipulative followers. The archetypal “organization man” is a product of a narcissistic organization. So is the status-obsessed CEO who believes that he or she is entitled to use the organization’s resources to demonstrate superior standing. And, since whatever demands the organization sees as “reasonable” must be met, narcissistic organizations quickly produce zombie-like employees who sacrifice any other parts of their life to the organization’s needs. There can be no work/life balance where employment in the organization is seen as such a stupendous gift.

Is that where you want to spend your time? The longer you stay, the less your capacity for independent thought will be, and the more you will come to believe that whatever the organization approves is automatically right. I have known several people who spent most of their careers in an organization of this type. In conversation, their constant praise for the organization quickly became embarrassing. It was also obvious that they formed an elite group, at least in their own estimation. For example, all agreed that in any problem situation, anywhere in the world, their automatic response would be to turn to the local branch of their organization for help and guidance. Not the authorities. Not friends or neighbors or family. Not even their own commonsense or critical thinking ability. If you hadn’t worked in their organization, you were automatically seen as somehow inferior.

Unless this seems an ideal world to you, don’t be tempted to work in such an environment. If you’re in one, and haven’t yet succumbed to group-think, start job hunting right away.

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Technorati tags: corporate culture problem bosses problem organizations groupthink group-think loyalty submission leadership slow leadership

The Psychopathic Organization

Part 2 of a series on the illnesses of today’s organizational cultures

A psychopath is a person suffering with a personality disorder resulting in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse. A psychopathic organization is one where aggressive, cruel, dishonest, or twisted behavior is allowed without any concern about the consequences or impact on others. Being psychopathic means, essentially, having no discernible sense of morality or ethics. It’s the most common kind of organizational sickness today.

If you encountered a person who displayed overt aggression, treated others with callousness, manipulated them for his or her own profit without any sign of remorse, and practiced daily amounts of dishonesty without any feelings of guilt or anxiety—save for the concern not to be caught—what would you think? Would you praise their behavior as displaying sound values? Would you hold them up as a positive example to others?

I doubt it very much. People like this are typically diagnosed with a psychopathic personality disorder and treated, sometimes under compulsion. Most mass murderers are psychopaths. They are often charming, cunning, arrogant, manipulative, and extremely hard to catch. Even when apprehended, most show no sign whatsoever of remorse or even recognition that what they have done is wrong.

Sadly, very similar behavior is common in organizations today. Not so extreme, of course. Organizations don’t commit murder (usually). But many do display no discernible sense that manipulating others, exploiting the weak, increasing profits by various forms of unethical behavior, or even some levels of dishonesty (providing you don’t get caught), are wrong in any way. Worse, some of these psychopathic organizations become the darlings of Wall Street and the financial press, simply based on the vast profits that they generate for their shareholders and managers.

How do you recognize a psychopathic organization?

• There is no interest in anything other than making profits and winning out over the competition. Just about anything that achieves this end counts as “fair,” regardless of its effect on others. Anyone who shows scruples is dismissed as “weak” or a “pinko.”
• Cunning, devious, and manipulative behavior is seen as “clever,” so long as it leads to benefits for the organization. Rules are there to be circumvented. Laws are more often evaded than honored. The only “sin” is being caught.
• “Spin” is important; the truth is not. Fine sounding statements are made with a nudge and a wink to insiders. Lying in the “good cause” of corporate profits is treated as normal. There is little or no sense of remorse about virtually any behavior that improves the bottom line, however unpleasant, callous, unethical, or borderline dishonest.
• The organization is run by a clique who play by unwritten rules. Offending against those rules is unacceptable. Making the true motives and methods of the organization public—being a whistle-blower—will get you fired right away.
• The organization protects those who serve it best. You can get away with almost any behavior, just as long as you continue to turn in the results expected. Any investigation of such favored individuals will be suppressed. Those who don’t meet their targets receive no protection or help.
• There is a pervasive atmosphere of “us against the world.” Insiders can earn enormous sums of money. Progress and promotion depends on being seen as “the right sort:” someone who will play the approved games and close ranks against nosey outsiders—especially the authorities or any pressure groups that appear hostile to the organization’s single-minded pursuit of what it sees as its interests.

Spending any time within a psychopathic organization is extremely risky for your ethical and moral well-being. The only safe course of action is to get out as fast as you can. Extreme examples of organizational psychopathic behavior—Enron was the poster-child for this—lead to a very high risk of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion. You definitely don’t want to be around when this happens. But even less extreme versions of corporate psychopathology will put you under to constant pressure to fit in and accept that kind of behavior as normal.

Can these corporate psychopaths be cured? I think that they can, but only as a result of massive external pressure, and usually only after almost all the existing top management has been replaced. Leadership habits formed in a psychopathic atmosphere can be very hard to shake off, especially since the typical psychopath’s charm and cunning is deployed to make everything seem fine on the outside. Wall Street typically isn’t too particular about how profits are made, so long as no one gets caught out and the money keeps rolling in. That’s why organizations like this survive and seem to prosper.

The Roman emperor Vespasian was the first to raise money by putting a charge on public urinals. When some senators protested, he took a coin and waved it under their noses, saying: “It doesn’t smell, does it?” Today, quite a lot of corporate profit stinks to high heaven—but almost no one is out there sniffing.

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Technorati tags: business ethics corporate culture corporate ethics Hamburger Management corporate responsibility ethical leadership slow leadership

Organizational pathology: Why does it matter?

Part 1 of a series on the illnesses of today’s organizational cultures

Most articles produced on the topics of burnout, stress, and overwork approach the problems from the viewpoint of individuals and their choices. There’s often an unspoken assumption that the organizational context is a given: constant pressure to perform, tight deadlines, impossible expectations. From this perspective, the only way to cope lies in changing your day-to-day responses to a crazy world. This series aims to look at stress and overwork from the perspective of the organization and the diseases of its internal operation.

Many of us have suffered under bosses who are jerks. Their tantrums, callous disregard for others, pompous self-importance, arrogance, and obsessive ambition were the background to our daily lives—and the immediate source of most of the stress and frustrations of the job. But were they born this way; or did something in the organization itself make them jerks?

In an individual case, either or both of these questions might deserve to be answered “yes”. Many bosses have significant personality flaws that cause them to behave like *ssholes. Others might have been less obnoxious, if only the organizational culture hadn’t encouraged—even forced—them to show the worst side of their characters.

A sick organizational culture is bound to cause problems for all those who work within it.

While dealing with stress and burnout from an individual point of view is both valid and useful, personal lifestyle and behavioral choices are not the only factors involved—nor always the most significant ones. A sick organizational culture is bound to cause problems for all those who work within it. Unless it is reformed, no amount of personal change will do more than act as a temporary Band-Aid to hold people together and keep them functioning despite the poison all around.

Every organization develops a unique character, based on an institutionalized set of automatic approaches to the world. That is what we usually call the organizational culture. Some are benign, others strongly poisonous, but all serve as the background to people’s working lives. A toxic leader in a basically benign culture can usually be held in check. If he or she acts out such character flaws too often or too much, the organization is likely to move to curb the bad behavior. Only silence on the part of those who suffer will mask the problem, as least for a time.

But what of “ordinary” leaders, neither especially good nor markedly bad? What will happen to them . . ?

A good leader in a toxic organization will also find him or herself rejected. Most will remove themselves well before that happens, since the poisonous culture around them will be more than they can tolerate. But what of “ordinary” leaders, neither especially good nor markedly bad? What will happen to them, if the culture around them constantly promotes negative, oppressive, Hamburger Management behavior?

I was interested to note on Bob Sutton’s blog that a newspaper article reviewing the French translation of his book, “The No *sshole Rule,” (“Objectif Zéro-Sale-Con” in France) was titled: “L’entreprise, pépinière de cons...” In English, this means something like: “The company, a tree nursery for *ssholes.”

Sadly, this statement is all too true. Many organizations act exactly like garden nurseries where jerks and *ssholes are grown in bulk. These enterprises cling to cultures that force any good managers to leave, allow bad ones to flourish, and shift the great mass of in-betweens slowly and inexorably towards the dark side.

In the next few days, I plan to review some of the most typical categories of toxic organizational cultures, drawing heavily on the work of Manfred Kets de Vries, a Dutchman who is professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD, the premier European business school, as well as my own experience.

Organizations have lives of their own that impact all who come into contact with them. If the culture that develops internally demands results at any cost, it is inevitable that the organization’s leaders will respond by creating the ideal conditions for stress and burnout: irrational demands, overwhelming pressure, casual cruelty, macho posturing, and suffocating conformity. Since these are precisely the conditions that will also nurture the greatest concentration of jerks, the management class of such an organization will rapidly teem with *ssholes of every type.

Organizational problems demand organizational solutions. You cannot expect personal change, however good in itself, to have much impact. That’s why Slow Leadership requires more than individual development. It requires that organizations themselves understand how counter-productive and negative their behavior may have become. They too have to admit to being *ssholes.

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Technorati tags: corporate culture Hamburger Management No Asshole Rule toxic organizations slow leadership

The problem of ambition

Is being strongly ambitious a benefit? Is searching for excellence always worth it? Whatever happened to “good enough?”

The Ancient Greeks had a word for the behavior shown by over-ambitious people who went too far in striving for excellence. The word was hubris. Not in our modern use of the word as meaning little more than being somewhat too big for your boots, but in its original sense of causing your own destruction by drawing down the wrath of the gods. The writers of Greek tragedies focused on showing the effects of hubris on previously successful people: men like Oediipus the king, who blinded himself, and King Agamemnon, murdered in his bath by his wife and her lover. In our modern world, we have forgotten that the pursuit of excellence can sometimes go too far: that crossing certain boundaries turns success into a nightmare of deceit, stress, and guilt. Maybe we ought to recover this idea, for the sake of our sanity.

This is something that it’s worth thinking about; a saying I came across somewhere (I can’t recall quite where), but which has stuck with me because it seems to express something profound about the way that most of us live our lives:

80 percent of the problems in your life come from wanting what you don’t have. The other 20 percent come from getting it.

Our consumer society cannot exist without a large majority of people constantly wanting what they don’t (yet) have. Advertisers and marketers spend their lives promoting craving in potential customers: not just a craving for particular products, but a generalized sense that you are never complete. There is always something new to long for—and seek to find some way of possessing. Always something more to pull you on into greater and greater hubris.

People in the past shared the belief that mankind began in an ideal state (the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden) and, since then, has descended in a more and more debased and troubled existence. Nearly everyone nowadays believes the exact opposite. Our superficial assumption of progress convinces us that each year will be better, more prosperous, more plentiful than the last. Success can never be too great. Like the profits in commercial endeavors, the only acceptable direction is upwards—and the faster the better. But is it true?

Our belief in unending progress is just as much a cultural myth as those ancient beliefs in a Garden of Eden and a subsequent fall from grace. Before we dismiss these stories as simple pessimism, consider this: they actually offer us a clear-sighted view that going too far typically extracts a terrible price in mental health; one that quickly destroys all the success that went before. With constant ambition and desire for more comes constant anxiety. What if your progress falters? What if others do better than you? What if you suffer some significant failure that thrusts you backwards? What if the only way to go on winning seems to be to lie, cheat, and use any means to destroy rivals? What if failure, however small, flips you into depression, or even a psychotic episode?

It’s no coincidence that the highest achievers are typically the most anxious and stressed. Those who have gained most have most to lose. Stress hits hardest at those who are most productive and successful. They live with a constant sense of fear. They worry whether their progress is good enough. Whatever they earn, whatever level in the hierarchy they reach, however many goods they buy, there is always more, just out of reach. They cannot relax because they never reach the point where they feel relaxation can be justified. They have lost the notion of “good enough;” of reaching a state where what they have is sufficient, so that they can now spend time enjoying it. They never recognize the point when productivity becomes less important than pleasure.

To find pleasure in your life, you first need to come to terms with the fact that constant economic striving and enjoying yourself are rarely fully compatible. Making time and space for pleasure usually demands stepping back from all that striving to be the leading rat in the race. “Good enough” can be better than excellence, if the price of achieving excellence is continual overwork with a thick topping of anxiety and guilt.

Even for businesses, the cost of being the market leader can become too high to tolerate. A good business that provides sufficient wealth for those whom it employs, some reasonable stability for the future, and a lifestyle that has a good balance of pleasure as well as productivity, used to be the ideal. Only in recent times has that image been replaced with that of an organization that is never satisfied with anything; and which automatically responds to meeting any goal by setting another, more demanding than before.

We need to see this for what it is: not some profound and inescapable truth, but just another cultural norm that will, one day in the future, seem just as strange as the wearing of powdered wigs and knee-breeches seems to us today. For most of us, “good enough” is in truth very good indeed. Pushing too far beyond it often produces more stress than is compatible with a good life. The problem of ambition has always been the same: knowing when to stop.

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Technorati tags: workplace stress anxiety overwork over ambition hubris slow leadership

News and Views: April 21st 2007

Weighing up Australian values

While this article is specifically about Australia (where there seems to be an extremely lively debate in progress about work/life balance and the demands modern management places on people), many of the points raised apply anywhere. I was especially interested to see this comment: “The obligation accepted by most employers to offer longer-term security in return for workers accepting the employer’s authority no longer form the basis of work contracts. Today’s emphasis on individual work contracts is based on the interest of employers as opposed to values reflecting a sense of reciprocal social responsibility.” Important stuff! It’s a great shame that America seems immune to such probing discussions of the nature of working life and the obligations it should impose on all sides. [link]

Measure your job status quotient

If you like slightly oddball questionnaires, here’s one that you can try. It claims to be able to measure your job’s impact on your wealth. It points out, quite reasonably, that your job helps dictate how you can live right now, and how you will be able to live in the future (based on what—and if—you can save any money from your current salary. Don’t treat this as any kind of scientific analysis, but it might just help you to think rather more deeply about your job in the context of your total finances. [link]

The perils of Retail Therapy

Here’s another thoughtful piece from Down Under. Do you spend lavishly to cheer yourself up after a miserable week at work? Do you “reward” yourself for those long hours and excessive stress by going on a shopping spree? Are you so busy at work that you have to pay people to handle most—maybe even all—of those routine household chores? Here’s an article that weighs in pretty heavily on: “working to afford to be able to work.” I can do no better than to quote one paragraph: “I now teach people how insidious the working to pay for working cycle is. The more hours you spend working, the more money is required to handle the non-working part of your life, which means you have to work more, and on it goes. It starts with the occasional take-away, but can quickly extend to every part of your life. You can’t afford the time to build those bookshelves, so you buy them. You jump in the car to go to the local shop instead of walking because you don’t want to waste that half-hour walking. You get depressed at your lifestyle and you compensate by buying something you don’t need and can’t really afford.” [link]

Sick of your job . . . or sick because of it?

Here’s yet another scary and depressing survey from Great Britain: “The latest 24-7 survey—a research project conducted by the Work Life Balance Center and the universities of Keele, Coventry and Wolverhampton—found that two thirds of employees have been made ill by work, with 48% of these suffering from depression, and 43% suffering from anxiety or panic attacks.” Maybe it’s the dreadful weather there. Maybe UK universities are more ready to delve into workplace problems that universities in other parts of the world. Whatever the reason, it does seem that much of the bad news about the workplace is coming from Europe at present. Is everything so sunny in the USA? Or are people here just conditioned to keep quiet? [link]

Jack Welch on work/life balance

If you want a viewpoint from probably the ultimate guru of Hamburger Management, here’s Jack Welch on work/life balance: “The problem with that word is 'balance.' The word is choices, and you make them. You in the end make choices, and you live with them. Its not a company’s job to make your choice or to make the choice easy for you. I respect all the choices you make, but no company is working to make your balance; they’re dealing with your choices. If firms can’t attract people with intrinsic value and pay packages, then they have other problems.” Hmm. I translate that as: “I don’t care about your life—never did—but I do care about making money. If you get in the way of that, ‘dealing with your choices’ is going to include firing you.” It’s a bit like asking the Pope to recommend a really hot, sexy night club. [link]

One cross Englishman

More from across the pond, this time a lengthy rant against the whole idea of people feeling that they ought to be happy. Most of the article is a book review, but I noticed this broadside against those who promote the idea of work/life balance: “Unfortunately government has caught a bad dose of ‘happy clapping’ and ministers have latched onto the idea that we should try to engineer this happiness. You see it in the work-life balance debate (read work=unhappy, life=happy). You also see it within organizations, as hapless HR people try to take control of the emotional welfare of employees. Self-appointed armies of coaches, counsellors, mentors and therapists are crawling all over organizations searching for the pathological. Everyday emotions and ordinary contention are diagnosed as illnesses and people with creepy ‘open questioning’ techniques come in to offer cures.” The author claims he wants to stir people up. I suspect he had a bad experience with someone from HR in his past. [link]

Are you being scheduled to death?

It's amazing how many people—including senior executives—accept having little or no control over their working days. Their time is almost entirely taken up with activities scheduled for them by other people. Why do they do it? Is it just bravado? THis article doesn't come up with any answers, but it surely recognizes the problem and points to some ways out of the mess. [link]

Working kills people

Hell, so does eating, drinking, having sex, and just being alive. Still, those are all more exciting and pleasant ways to do it. Here’s yet more scary research from Great Britain on this topic: “Research from the UK Work Foundation found that the main cause of the 2.6 million people on long term sickness and incapacity benefit is workplace stress, costing the tax payer billions of pounds every year. Our current command and control organizational model is literally killing people. Recent research by McKinsey & Company indicates that “half or more of a company’s spending on labor may be devoted to basic interaction activities, many of them internal to the organization”. Again corroborated by other UK Work Foundation research finding that non-productive interactions in many organizations exceed 60%.” Maybe new approaches to work can give an answer. But then again, maybe not. [link]

Be a stringent gatekeeper of your time.

Here’s a great piece by someone who has suddenly woken up to the way that we allow our time to be nibbled away by every type of unproductive and wasteful activity— especially if we spend large parts of the day in from of a computer. Here are two points I like particularly: “Stop trying to accommodate a global work schedule. Again, unless it’s really mandatory or unavoidable, I work during my work hours, not those in other parts of the world;” and “Make ‘no’ the default answer for new project/app review/etc. requests. New things should earn their way into the attention field.” [link] [via]

Use money to buy time?

Penelope Trunk has an interesting, contrarian article about the relationship between time and money. We all know the old saw: “Time is money.” She suggests this is so only because we “buy” money with our time. As she points out: “Time is more important than money. You think that you know this, but you probably don’t act on it as much as you could. If you spend your time buying material things then you are using up the one thing that can make you happy (time) on things that definitely don’t make you happy (stuff).” All the excessive time in the workplace can indeed lead lead to an impressive salary. But time is a very finite resource. If you use most of it to get money, what will be left? Many rich people no longer have the time to enjoy their wealth, which seems to render the whole process futile. [link]

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The Pyschopathology of Organizations

Some of today’s organizations are psychologically and ethically sick. Maybe that is why the people who work in them begin to act in sick ways too.

Business thinking has fallen into a number of bad habits in the past few decades, but one of the worst is the assumption that bad actions, whether in the general office or the boardroom, are solely due to the personality, character, or ethical problems of individual perpetrators. Firing the people involved, or disciplining them in some other way, is seen as providing a total solution to such issues. The slate is wiped clean. This is not the case, as I will show.

We rightly expect people to be held accountable for their actions—especially those in positions of power and trust. Every action represents some more or less conscious choice, and we all need to acknowledge that our choices have consequences. Yet personal decisions, whether inspired by problems of personality, defective values, or ethical blindness, are far from the only factors at work when things go wrong. Organizations can become damaged, perverted, or just plain sick within themselves, just as much as individuals can. A single, mentally sick individual has pointlessly destroyed more than 30 innocent lives at Virginia Tech. A single ethically and procedurally sick organization can take away thousands of people’s jobs, destroy their pensions, or subject its workers to daily cruelty, humiliation, and exploitation.

Human organizations are hybrid entities: part mechanical systems and constructions; part human communities, with all the emotional and psychological baggage that entails. Probably the best way to see them is as biological entities. We humans, for example, have some largely mechanical parts to our bodies (bones and muscles), which grow and develop over time to provide the necessary framework. What animates and directs that framework is our brain: the thinking, feeling, judging part, with its own complex of automatic systems and conscious choices.

As our bodies may develop handicaps, sicknesses, and diseases, so organizations can become crippled and distorted.

In much the same way, organizations develop frameworks of systems, policies, money flows, and procedures, directed and animated by the human element. As our bodies may develop handicaps, sicknesses, and diseases, so organizations can become crippled and distorted so that their systems work in negative and destructive ways.

When that happens, the organization itself becomes sick and provides an unhealthy, even poisonous, culture and context for work. In time, if the people within it fail to take action to heal the sickness, they too are made sick by the context of negativity and the warped outlook all around them.

Stanford Psychology Professor Emeritus Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in 1971, using prison inmates, in which he showed how systems, situations, and roles involving power influence human behavior. His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, isn’t an easy read. The examples are too often of horrific cruelty and abuse and the style is somewhat ponderous and hectoring. But the point remains that there is good evidence, culled from multiple sources, that sick organizational and social contexts quickly make the people within them act in equally sick and perverted ways. It’s just a question of which comes first: whether the apples in the barrel were bad, or (his view) the barrel was bad and infected the apples.

What we see all too often today are organizations rich in spreadsheets, but with withered or distorted hearts.

Within the business world, I suspect that there are both bad apples and bad barrels. We seem to be very aware of the first and somewhat blind to the second. Yet those in charge of organizations surely have the duty to correct or root out their own sick systems and attitudes, just as much as they have a duty to deal with badly behaved individuals. If we, as a society, ought to refuse to tolerate jerks in positions of power—as we certainly ought—we should also refuse to tolerate organizational systems and approaches that create more jerks, more cruelty, and more barbarism in our workplaces.

What we see all too often today are organizations rich in spreadsheets, but with withered or distorted hearts. Places where people are treated as costly but inanimate objects, to be exploited and casually discarded, not as fellow human beings with hopes, dreams, and feelings. Work in an organization like that for too long and you risk seeing that distorted situation as normal. You become infected with the sickness all around you.

Do businesses exist to create profits? Of course. Is it acceptable to create profits in any way that works? Surely not, just as it is unacceptable in a civilized society to extract information by means of torture, even if that method seems to some to be likely to deliver what is wanted.

Business and organizational leaders must be held accountable for more than the financial health of their enterprises. The emotional, ethical, and psychological health of those systems is also their responsibility. They would do well to give that much more thought than they do.

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Technorati tags: corporate culture business ethics organizational structures leadership slow leadership

Getting it wrong to get it right

Organizations (and people) who are afraid to make mistakes can neither live nor learn effectively.

Yesterday, I wrote about Professor Russell Ackoff’s interview with Peter Day, reported here on the BBC web site. In the second part of that interview, the topic shifts away from business schools towards another key question: how can you be successful if you ignore, or hide, or deny your mistakes? Aren’t mistakes the basis of virtually all learning? If you don’t learn from them, who or what will be able to teach you anything?

It sometimes seems that our society is obsessed with prying into the mistakes of others, but that isn’t really true. The media have a prurient fascination with the mistakes of the rich and famous—especially any that involve sex—and there are many who take an equally perverse joy in proving to themselves that those whom they secretly envy are, in reality, no better then they are. Yet the greatest effort goes into hiding mistakes, or denying their very existence, as if making a mistake were the most shameful of social diseases. Politicians, business leaders, the rich and famous, all spend lavishly on covering up their mistakes.

Our society's petty and mean-minded ways of dealing with mistakes, focused as they are on pointing to others’ misdemeanors, while carefully concealing or ignoring your own, are so common that we scarcely notice any more. Sadly, this is also the way that mistakes are treated in most organizations: as something to be ashamed of, to punish, and to conceal or deny whenever possible. Listen to Professor Ackoff:

You never learn by doing something right, because you already know how to do it. The only opportunity for learning is to identify mistakes and correct them. If you are in an organization which says that mistakes are a bad thing, learning is suppressed. So you either try to avoid mistakes, or if you make them, you shift blame to someone else.

The simplest way to avoid mistakes is to do nothing; or at least to do nothing new or different from the conventional. If you resolutely stick to whatever is the most obvious, the most orthodox, and the most common, you at least have the chance of deflecting criticism by the time-worn practice of pointing to everyone else and saying that they did the same. As Ackoff points out, organizations have elaborate measurement and recording systems to note even the slightest sins of commission—doing what you ought not to have done—and none at all to deal with the worst kind of mistakes in business: not doing what you should have.

The worst kind of mistake is not being wrong, but something you did not do that you should have done. Errors of omission are responsible for failures and bankruptcy.

I think that he is right about that. Following the herd and sticking to the conventional and orthodox makes you mediocre and pedestrian, but it takes a long time to bring your business to its knees. Missing opportunities, ignoring mistakes, staying complacent in the face of change, and suppressing new ideas will all ruin you faster and much more effectively.

Yet that is what so many organizations are doing. They’re so hell-bent on imitating others and avoiding risks that they take the biggest risk of all: ignoring reality.

Choosing to stay the same is a choice with as many consequences as choosing to change in some way. One merely feels more active than the other.

Deciding not to do something is just as much a decision as its opposite. Choosing to stay the same is a choice with as many consequences as choosing to change in some way. One merely feels more active than the other. In reality, both represent an equally significant response to events. If one is punishable, so should the other be. Of course, honest mistakes—those made despite every effort to get it right—are no more worthy of being punished than getting wet when it rains. Life is unpredictable and often cruel. Only the dead are free from further errors.

To learn fully from your own mistakes, you should make as careful a note of when you decided not to act as when you did. Refusing to act is still your choice, and you should trace its consequences carefully. If you don't, at least half the lessons life can teach you will never be recognized. Sometimes the greatest gamble of all is to refuse to throw the dice.

In my own experience, as you get older, you spend far more time aware of all the opportunities that you didn’t take, and the things that you didn’t do—and now wish that you had—than regretting the mistaken actions or choices that you did go through with. Though you know that many of those missed opportunities would not have worked out—that you would have suffered hurts you avoided and much pain and embarrassment—you become aware of what you have missed that was far more valuable: experiences that would have taught you lessons that now you can never learn.

Getting it right, in work or life, nearly always involves a great deal of getting it wrong as well. Success depends critically on how you face up to failure, take the lesson it offers, and start again. Opportunities missed are usually gone for ever. The road not taken never shows up on the map again.

That’s why rushing through life, obsessed with conventional success and fixated purely on material gain, may produce riches and fame, but very often misses out on happiness and contentment. The New Testament of Christians asks: “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his soul?” You only have one trip around the sun. Use it well, or lose the chance of living and learning forever.

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Technorati tags: mistakes learning failure life lessons missed opportunities personal growth personal development self-development slow leadership

A failing grade for the world’s business schools?

Are they a route towards a solution to today’s workplace issues; or a major part of the problem?

A little while ago, I posted an article about Professor Russell Ackoff’s “Management f-Laws.” Professor Ackoff, now 88 years old, has a mind as sharp as a razor and a subversive wit to match. These laws cleverly expose many of today’s conventional management ideas and assumptions as flaws in the process of running a business, not well-established steps to success as is usually believed. Here’s Ackoff’s take on business schools.

Recently, Professor Ackoff was in London to promote his book. He was interviewed by Peter Day, the dean of British business correspondents, and the interviews are posted on the BBC’s web site. In this two-part article. I want to draw your attention to Professor Ackoff’s thinking about two issues critical to leadership and management: the role of business schools, and the impact of our modern culture of suppressing or denying many of our mistakes.

Here are some choice extracts from what Professor Ackoff had to say about business schools:

Business schools are way back. They’re behind even corporate practice. They are a major obstruction.

Information is more valuable than data, and knowledge more valuable than information, and understanding more valuable than knowledge. We devote all of our time and energy to information and a little bit to knowledge. None to understanding and still less to wisdom.

Heady stuff, but not, I suspect, that far from the truth in many cases. Hamburger Management has infiltrated business schools in a big way, causing them to turn out mostly people polished in applying today’s orthodox style of macho, finance-obsessed, short-term management, not knowledgeable, thinking professionals equipped to make up their own minds and challenge sloppy thinking.

Peter Day summarizes Ackoff’s observations on business schools like this:

When he retired from the Wharton School in 1986, Professor Ackoff wickedly identified three contributions of a business school education:

• It gives students a vocabulary that enables them to speak with authority on things they do not understand.
• It gives them a set of operating principles that enable them to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence.
• It gives them a ticket to a job where they can learn something about management.

Let’s consider each of these points from a Slow Leadership perspective.

Does an MBA help people to speak with authority on things that they don’t understand? I suspect it does, at least in this sense. To understand something fully takes time and experience, plus a willingness to reflect deeply on what you have observed over many different situations. It used to be that expertise went with age; mostly because age allowed for enough time to have passed, not because older people are automatically wiser. Now bright, young MBAs are assumed to know more than managers twice their age.

Older people are often assumed to be out-of-date, technologically illiterate, incapable of grasping new ideas. Is this the truth?

Does time at a business school count for so much more than experience doing a management job? Older people are often assumed to be out-of-date, technologically illiterate, incapable of grasping new ideas. Is this the truth? No, just another one of those conventional cultural myths that bedevil all societies, like wearing top hats or growing luxuriant whiskers marked out Victorian times. There are older people who refuse to stay current, but I strongly suspect that they were just as reactionary when they were 20 as today, when they are 60 or older. There are many young people who care nothing about new ideas, preferring to rely on mindless slogans and whatever is the currently fashionable clap-trap. Getting an MBA gives you access to today’s fashionable buzzwords, that’s for sure. I’m not convinced it always offers much else. Maybe that’s why so many businesses suffer from jargon-monoxide poisoning and creeping consultantitis.

In place of experience, we tend to rely on qualifications. Fine, if it’s also proof of some level of knowledge and hands-on training, as in the case of doctors. Not so good, if all it means is that you were able to absorb theoretical information and write term papers, as in the case of many MBAs.

What about the idea that business school student absorb a set of principles that are proof against all subsequent evidence that they are wrong?

. . . a whole generation of obsolescent executives, applying out-moded ideas together and never noticing they were doing it.

Also true. When I worked in management and executive posts, I came across hundreds of managers who had shown neither the inclination, nor the wit, to keep their knowledge up to date. Most relied entirely on a few basic principles they had learned maybe 25 years ago. They didn’t question them, because they had nothing to put in their place. Besides, questioning them would have taken time and thought, and they never slowed down enough to apply either. Since they were surrounded by others behaving in exactly similar ways, they appeared to fit in perfectly: a whole generation of obsolescent executives, applying out-moded ideas together and never noticing they were doing it.

The last of Peter Day’s points does at least offer hope. The best way to learn about management and business is by doing it. You’ll get ample experience and have the chance to test your ideas in realistic situations. So far so good.

There’s one catch. You have to be willing both to make mistakes and reflect on them honestly afterwards. Pushing them aside, or hiding them from everyone (including yourself), renders this chance for learning null and void. And it’s not just mistakes arising from what you did that count. More problems are caused by mistakes based on not doing what you ought to have done.

But that’s the topic of part two of this article.

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Technorati tags: MBAs business school management teaching management training leadership slow leadership

Antidotes to Hamburger Management

How to rid yourself and your organization of poisonous management.

Hamburger Management is management based on always doing whatever is quickest, simplest, and (above all) cheapest. Hamburger Managers provide the kind of leadership that is best described as: “Never mind the quality, look how fast it goes, and how cheap it is.” Sadly, this approach is being forced on a great many otherwise perfectly reasonable and responsible people by the continual demands of those at the top to meet inflated expectations of short-term profit. If you have been forced in the past into Hamburger Management approaches, can you find a way out? Are there antidotes to purge you of the poison? There are. Here are some of the best.

Is there hope for Hamburger Managers? Can they go to re-hab, like politicians and media stars, to be returned to society as reformed characters? Is there a de-toxification program? Indeed there is, and it doesn’t need you to stay in some remote resort or engage the services of a shrink. Let us reveal all.

One of the best antidotes to Hamburger Management is kindness in leadership and business dealings. That was the basis of my article: Is the Worm Turning? Macho, grab-and-go management styles, like Hamburger Management, are universally callous towards anyone who gets in the way of creating maximum (personal) profit in minimum time. In a civilized society, that really ought to be intolerable. If your words and actions are always marked by kindness, you cannot fall into Hamburger Management ways. It’s not possible. Be kind, always, and you’ll be free of the poison at once.

Check your ego at the door when you arrive each morning. I’ve long held the belief that the best way to “inspire” bosses to act in civilized ways would be to make any other behavior socially unacceptable. Nothing would change hearts and minds quicker that the prospect of being ostracized at the golf club; or no longer being invited to dinner by the “right kind of people” in the locality. Egotism is an intrinsic part of Hamburger Management. These macho management styles are sold to people on the basis that getting things done, even when it all seems impossible given the limited time and resources, will make you look good. And egotism is all about me, isn’t it? My career, my targets, my job security. If, instead, what you experienced was being shunned by all reasonable people, no one would stick with Hamburger Management for a week.

In a past posting called Take Any Two From Four . . ., I explained that work can be quick, cheap, innovative or good—but you can only have two of those qualities at any one time. Good, innovative work isn’t going to be cheap or quick, because it takes time and resources to break away from the dead hand of conformity. Quick, cheap ways of doing business (the hallmark of Hamburger Management) more or less ensure that the work done won’t be good (too expensive) or innovative (too slow and risky). That’s how good businesses go downhill, by focusing on short-term profits instead of lasting value. To remove the poison of Hamburger Management from your systems, as well as your own approach to leadership, make sure that you concentrate on long-term approaches whenever you can. Sort-term actions should flow from long-term strategies, not the other way around.

Hamburger Management cannot exist in the presence of genuine respect for others. The surest way to alienate and demotivate others is to deny them respect. Macho, grab-and-go management does this all the time. People are treated as “human resources:” depersonalized objects that are simply costs, tolerated only as long as there is no cheaper alternative. If you can do without them, fine. If you can’t, but can outsource the work somewhere where people will work for much lower pay, also fine—even if those people are little better than slaves in some Third-World sweatshop. The minute you feel that you can find a cheaper way, forget any soft ideas about loyalty to your workers. As Circuit City showed recently, with a Hamburger Management approach you shouldn't waste time considering the possibility that what you’re doing is barbaric and marks you and your business out as *ssholes on a massive scale.

Nothing slows business down more than time spent in pointless meetings, but it’s not the kind of slowing down we advocate at Slow Leadership. Too many meetings have absolutely nothing to do with communicating information—and still less with listening to other peoples’ thoughts and ideas. Here’s a very quick list of the most common—but almost never acknowledged—reasons for holding meetings:

• Demonstrating your power and authority by proving that you can call people together, regardless of how busy they are—just because you want to.


• Giving yourself a platform for pontificating and polishing your ego.


• Playing office politics. Meetings are a great forum for practicing one-upmanship and humiliating political opponents.


• Holding fake consultations so that you can claim others were party to some decision. A great way to cover your butt if things go wrong.


• Demonstrating how busy and important you are (because you have to attend so many meetings).

If your meetings contain time wasted on any of the above, either drop the meeting altogether (if at all possible) or severely limit the time allocated.

There are only two genuine reasons for holding a meeting:

1. Sharing information when you are willing—and able—to answer any questions immediately; and when the subject matter is such that large groups of people need to get identical information at the same time.


2. Situations when you are willing to seek genuine ideas, thoughts, and feedback from the participants and listen to what is said honestly and with an open mind.

Meetings held for any other reason are a waste of time and are likely to be due to a slide towards Hamburger Management.

Instead of cluttering up people’s time with silly meetings, constant phone calls to “check progress,” foolish demands for progress reports, and other childish activities based on your own suspicions and fears, why not try trusting your subordinates to do their jobs? Give them the space, time, trust, and support to make it happen. If more corporations tried that approach, I believe they would discover they have plenty of time to get everything done, without all the stress and long hours. All they need to do is to free themselves from pointless reporting, useless meetings, the collection of meaningless statistics, petty rules, the preparing of endless PowerPoint presentations with justifications for any and every minor action, and all the other common means of covering those so-delicate executive butts.

Good business is not about being quick, simple, or cheap. It’s about being better at what you do than anyone else. And that includes service, quality, and innovation too. That’s why Hamburger Management is ultimately self-defeating. Rushing, cutting corners, compromising quality and innovation to get quick profits, sacrificing long-term success for short-term gratification, strutting around like an oversized rooster, feeding your already-inflated ego, and pretending that you are John Wayne are the marks of an immature mind and a crippled personality.

That’s not business, it’s personal display, like a stag at the rutting ground. Save it for trying to impress other gullible idiots. The rest of us already think you’re a total jerk.

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Technorati tags: Hamburger Management trust respect kindness honesty ethical business leadership slow leadership

If you want to be more creative, give yourself more time

If you want the people in your team to be more creative, the same applies to them.

In all the discussion about creativity, one subject that rarely occurs is time: the necessity of giving yourself enough time to allow the creative process to happen. Maybe we’re too influenced by the Hollywood idea of the sudden flash of brilliant insight, so we ignore the patient period of thinking and ruminating essential for any flash of inspiration to happen. Given the rush in today’s world, and the constant demands for instant gratification, we’re in danger of becoming steadily less creative—right when we need it most.

Getting creative ideas takes far longer than people usually allow. It’s not the idea itself—that may come in an instant—it’s the preparation, plus the time needed afterwards to check it out, explain it to others, and turn it into a practical plan of action. Creativity isn’t something that you can ignore for years, then expect to be able to switch on right away. It needs practice, nurturing, fuel, time to grow, time to allow the basic ingredients to swirl around inside your head in chaotic form, until one day something clicks and the idea is there.

• The first requirement for creative thinking is fuel: knowledge, information, concepts, facts from many sources, different perspectives, shifting viewpoints. You need time to read—then read some more. Nothing gives better fuel for the “creative juices” than reading. Nothing is more effective in helping you to learn, to think, to reflect, and to internalize all the ingredients that will, one day, come together in some new and unexpected way. The general lessening of time spent reading is the direct cause of most of the obvious problems we have with limited thinking and stunted imaginations. The Internet is a great research tool. Lectures, talks, TV documentaries, and videos have their place. But nothing, nothing beats reading. If you want to be creative, read as much and as often as you can. There’s no better way to stimulate your mind. Show me a home free of books and I’ll show you people with little or no spark of creative thought in their heads.


• Next, you need time to find those unexpected links between ideas, thought patterns, or areas of knowledge that are the bedrock of innovation. The brain finds it hard to hang on to disconnected pieces of information. Unlike a computer, it doesn’t cope well with large amounts of more or less random data. What it does best is to see connections, ways of linking information together into patterns in place of independent pieces of data. Remembering a principle and applying it is far easier to do that recalling a fact. This process is always slow. It’s still slower when we are searching for connections that are new or unexpected. Do we see innovative links instantly? Usually not. It takes time to find and register them fully, then understand them well enough to grasp their potential for changing the way we do things or see our world.


• You will also need time to prioritize these budding ideas and choose which ones are worth more attention and energy. Doing this in a rush risks making mistakes, missing good ideas, and wasting effort on those that soon run into the sand. Creative thoughts don’t come in neat packages. They arrive mixed with other thoughts or notions that aren’t what you are looking for. You need time to sort them out.


• Checking your growing ideas, researching, and creating sensible plans for implementation also take time. You aren’t going to be successful with every creative thought or idea every time. Many will fizzle out, or prove to be more difficult—and provide fewer benefits—than appeared at first. You need to “noodle” around, trying them out, adapting, extending, combining, and dropping poor ideas in favor of better ones. Until you start to explore how a creative thought might work in practice, you can’t see clearly which are going to be worth taking further.


• Most of all, you need time to daydream. I’m not talking about sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. That’s a romantic idea that bears no relation to what genuinely creative people do. In all those “gaps” where they appear to be doing nothing at all, the world’s outstanding creative minds are hard at work below the surface: reflecting, ruminating, “noodling” with odd ideas, daydreaming possibilities, and tinkering with patterns and unexpected connections. What you see is the tiniest tip of a mental iceberg: nearly all the activity that brought it about is hidden below the surface. Time spent day-dreaming, or running over intriguing ideas in your head, is the “soil” in which creative ideas grow.

How do you make this time? The simplest way is to arrange your day to stop wasting so much of the time you already have. To-do lists and similar organizational tools can help, but they mostly make it easier to recall objectives and track tasks, by putting them into some kind of order. Useful stuff, but not critical to creativity. Finding more time for creativity needs you to recognize how much garbage doesn’t need to be on your calendar or to-do list at all. Many items can simply be dumped: pointless meetings, reading and sending endless e-mails, wasting time on reports designed to cover someone’s backside, or team co-ordination meetings when there’s nothing to co-ordinate. Have nothing to do with Instant Messages. Stop people copying you on e-mails of no consequence. Don’t waste time gossiping or swapping e-mail jokes. Turn your cellphone off sometimes. Refuse to become a slave to a BlackBerry. There’s plenty of time really, so long as you stop allowing it to be frittered away on rubbish like this. Set aside time to think and defend it as ferociously as a lioness defends her cubs.

Most people don’t achieve anywhere near their full creative potential just because they never give themselves time to do so. They’re so conditioned to quick action that they give up on fresh thinking long before it has any chance to develop. Don’t make the same mistake.

One of the worst aspects of modern life is the constant hurry. Not only does it create stress and tension, it goes a long way to making us all seem dumber and less creative than we are. If you want to get your brain going, slow down . . . and give it some time and space to work.

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Technorati tags: creativity innovation generating new ideas personal development slow leadership

News and Views: April 14th 2007

Bad bosses are expensive

It seems that more employees than ever are walking out on maddening managers, at least in countries like Australia, where unemployment is low. A survey found that 82% of respondents had left a job rather than put up with a boss who acted like a jerk. Around 75% claimed that they would turn a job down, even one with higher pay, if the boss had a bad reputation. In a time when there is said to be a scarcity of talent, that’s a cost that could really do with being cut back hard. Hidden in the text is an even worse statistic: more than half of the people questioned said their manger did not always keep their word or provide leadership. Why do companies put up with these idiots in so-called leadership positions? Could it be that the guys at the top are no better? [link] [via]

The leader’s link to creativity and productivity

I usually enjoy what Dan Bobinski writes for Management Issues. This article is no exception. It includes this great quote from Dr. William Glasser: “Bossed workers tend to pay no attention to their creativity because they know it is not wanted; no one will listen to them anyway. Stifling creativity (which is easily stifled—a derisive look may do it forever) may be the worst effect of bosses.” it’s all too easy to blame employees for lacking creativity, but the truth is that far too many senior managers are not nearly as good at engaging the creativity and interest of their employees as they think that they are. [link]

Who benefits?

Wall Street never loses its appetite for corporate mergers, the bigger the better. Why would it? The banks and various advisers make megabucks on every one. Top managers also seem to love mergers and acquisitions, mostly because gobbling up other organizations boosts their egos. So who loses out? Shareholders, it seems, in a big way. And employees, naturally, since most mergers bring huge job losses. Oh . . . and the customers, since, according to this survey, more than 90% of mergers and acquisitions don’t work as planned—or at all. You can argue over the reasons, but the truth seems to lie in the old adage about never giving a sucker an even break. So long as management egotism abounds, others will see it as a license to print money. [link]

A rose-tinted view of innovation

Yet more evidence of smugness and complacency at the top. While senior-level executives are more likely to be satisfied with their organization’s innovation in products and technology, their professional technocrats, such as engineers and programmers, are the least satisfied. Nearly three quarters of senior-level executives say they are satisfied, yet just six out of 10 professional employees feel the same way, rising to seven out of 10 mid-level managers. The higher you go, the smugger you get. [link]

Can’t get no respect no mo’

Bosses are also human, of course (yes, they really are), and some in Great Britain have been talking to The Guardian about disrespectful staff, disloyalty, and all the whining that goes on. It seems that the peons are revolting in more ways than one—ten, to be precise. See the workplace from the point of view of a poor, misunderstood executive. Great fun! [link]

Nine things a leader needs to do to build and maintain trust

Kent Blumberg offers nine great ideas on how to create more trust—an essential element in a civilized workplace, and one that is all too often the victim of mindless Hamburger Management. Here are two essential points from the list: “1. Always tell the truth. If you can’t answer a question, explain why. The smallest lie kills trust.” and “5. The more micromanagement and rules, the lower the level of trust. Rules imply lack of trust. Micromanagement implies the same.” [link]

Baby Boomers in the driving seat

As a Baby Boomer myself, this article interested me. It seems that, in Great Britain at least, the over-50 population now command approximately 80% of the total wealth. It also claims that: “people aged between 52 and 60, have achieved a form of perfect work/life balance that Generation X—people in their 20s, 30s and 40s—strive for but may never afford.” I didn’t know I was so fortunate. “Perfect” work/life balance, eh? Seems what they really mean is that we oldies have saved and got pensions and now have money to burn. Ummm . . . not sure about that last bit. [link]

12 Tips for Creating Lasting Change in Your Life

Here’s an interesting list, compiled by M.J. Ryan. I like: “Make it Non-negotiable” and “Come Up with Solutions for Your Usual Excuses.” Here’s the best: “We’re doing the best we can. We will mess up or forget. When we do, our task is to hold ourselves in love. You and I are human beings dealing with the challenges of growth. When we treat ourselves with kindness, we don’t collapse into shame or guilt, but can try again with greater wisdom for having faltered.” [link]

“Desk Rage?”

We all know about Road Rage. Now here’s an odd little piece about the perils of “Desk Rage.” Well, maybe not so odd when you recall the cases, some very recent, where disgruntled employees have gone into their place of work, armed with a gun, and killed fellow workers. It appears that: “22% of American workers report having been driven to tears as a result of workplace stress; and 9% . . . report that physical violence has occurred at their workplace due to stress.” Scary stuff! [link]

Lack of Control of Work Hours Leads to Burnout

Doctors, we know, often work terrible hours and face stresses the rest of us fortunately never have to deal with. So this is an interesting report, since it claims to show that it isn’t the hours, or the pressures themselves, that cause burnout, but the sense of having no control. In general, the analysis of the results revealed that female and male physicians are highly satisfied with their careers, but: “The strongest predictors of whether physicians will experience burnout and career dissatisfaction are how much control they have over their schedules and over the total number of hours worked in a week.” That seems to me to be true in other professions too. Lacking control over your own work schedule and the number of hours of work that you do each week is such a basic human need that being deprived of it must undermine your whole sense of being in charge of your life. If you feel that you’re on a treadmill that you can neither slow down nor stop, burnout is just around the corner. [link]

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Whose fault is it anyway?

Making yourself responsible for what you cannot control makes for a miserable life.

Are you accountable for your actions—or responsible for the results? Can you be held responsible for making something happen—or only for the way that you try? Get the answer wrong and you’re setting yourself up for a good deal of unnecessary stress and anxiety. Sadly, Hamburger Managers habitually confuse accountability with responsibility, especially when it comes to pressuring their people to serve up unrealistic targets. It sounds tough and practical to say that winning is all that matters, but it’s still nonsense. No one can control events or outcomes, not even today’s ultra-macho managers. Yet many are half-killing themselves by trying.

Yesterday, I wrote about the negative role played by an overdeveloped ego. Now I want to consider a related issue. Many organizations and executives treat accountability and responsibility as the same. More demand specific results and state that someone or other is being held responsible for getting them. By doing so, they’re causing stress and confusion on a large scale. Keeping the meaning of these common terms clear is essential for proper leadership; as is understanding what someone should rationally be held accountable for and what they certainly should not.

If you’re accountable for something, it means that you are the person who is liable to be called to account for progress, success, or failure: to “give an account” explaining what happened, what you did in response, and why. It doesn’t mean that you need to do everything associated with that project yourself. Nor that success or failure ultimately depends on your actions. Most of what happens in the world does so by chance, or due to such a complex tangle of causes and related effects that it is impossible to determine the exact reason (if there was one). To be accountable means that you have to answer for your actions (or lack of them). It does not mean that you should be blamed for every failure or congratulated for every success. Most have nothing to do with you. Whatever you did had no effect on them.

This is tough for many people to accept. As a species, humans like simple, clear causes that produce obvious effects. Our brains are programmed to try to find them. The human sub-species that works in the media is especially prone to inventing simple reasons for every event. You need only listen to the pundits discussing the day’s trading on Wall Street to hear an impossibly complex set of global financial interactions reduced to some bland statement that trading was up or down due to something simple, like a speech, one set of figures, or “nervous investors.”

To be responsible for something is generally understood to imply that you—and whatever you did or left undone—were the direct cause of whatever happened. It’s all down to you to control people and events to bring about the desired result.

Thinking like this is giving yourself ludicrous airs, but the ego loves it. It puts you right at the center of events. It makes you important, critical, essential to success. Egotistical Hamburger Managers typically make this kind of claim, pointing to positive outcomes and saying: “I did that.” But if you’re the cause of the good things, you have to be the cause of the bad ones too. Now that’s not so nice. Of course, people are quick to attribute failures and messes to others, to unexpected events, and to simple chance. All true. But if the failures are down to chance most of the time, won’t the successes be due to the same random combination of events?

Smith is responsible. Blame Smith. Quick, clean, simple. And wrong, in the vast majority of cases.

Treating other people as responsible is also tempting because it sounds tough and makes life simple. If Smith is responsible for sales and sales fall, fire Smith. It’s his or her fault. There’s no wasting time trying to find out what went wrong. No potentially embarrassing inquiry that might suggest others above Smith had some part to play in the failure. Smith is responsible. Blame Smith. Quick, clean, simple. And wrong, in the vast majority of cases.

You can see this attitude all around us. The corporation is in trouble? Fire the CEO (with an enormous golden parachute) and hire a new, higher profile one (with a huge signing-on bonus.) And if things get no better afterwards? Fire the new CEO—then repeat as required.

Does anyone ever reckon up the cost of these repeated restructurings? Or ask why so few of them appear to work? These people may have been accountable for some or all of the business, but they are rarely (if ever) personally responsible for what happened. Firing them is a purely emotional response: a wish to see someone suffer (though the golden parachutes make it the kind of suffering most of us would love to volunteer for!). It has no logic to it. What’s needed is to take the time to find out, if possible, what the real problems are and correct those.

If this was only about fat cat executives, most of us would find it tough to care. Sadly, it applies at all levels. Bosses hold subordinates responsible (not just accountable) for all kinds of events outside anyone’s capacity to influence. Worse still, people hold themselves responsible: accepting the blame for past failures and tormenting themselves with guilt and regrets.

I wince when I read nonsense like the idea that each of us is somehow responsible for what happens in our lives, probably through some magical psychic transference. It’s total rubbish. We are accountable for our actions—always—but we cannot affect large parts of what happens in our lives and careers in any way. All we can do is react to events as sensibly as we can.

It’s time to leave behind this childish, simplistic view of cause and effect that owes more to superstition, revenge, and primitive religiosity than any logic.

It’s time to drop the silly, Hamburger Management nonsense that claims people must take responsibility for events that are wholly, or even partly, outside their control; time to leave behind this childish, simplistic view of cause and effect that owes more to superstition, revenge, and primitive religiosity than any logic. Superstition believes that unrelated events effect one another (the stars and events on earth). Lynching someone because bad things happened is the response of a primitive society. And there’s no evidence to suggest that the gods, let alone a supposedly loving God, spend their time messing up peoples’ lives as punishment for various sins.

By all means let us hold those in positions of power accountable for what they do—sensible, stupid, or corrupt—but forget feeding their egos (and our desire to hit back) by pretending that they are personally responsible for every outcome. Luck plays a huge part in the career of every successful person. Few executives, even CEOs, have much personal power to do more that torment their subordinates.

Stand back, slow down, and accept that most of life’s problems will take careful exploration to understand properly. Action without understanding is foolish. But then, Hamburger Management is the most foolish approach of all.

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Technorati tags: accountability responsibility Hamburger Management leadership slow leadership

Of Expansive Egos and Hamburger Managers

Can organizations afford what corporate egos are costing them?

"To have without possessing,
do without claiming,
lead without controlling;
this is mysterious power."
                 Tao Te Ching, Lau Tzu (tr. Ursula K. Le Guin)

Ego and egotism are endemic to Hamburger Management, but fatal to good leadership. Egotism causes over-optimism, over-confidence, and arrogance. Big egos inflate people into domineering monsters focused on petty personal victories, who wreck relationships and rush to take on too much, in the erroneous belief that they’re the only people sufficiently capable. Then such people demand too much from their teams to sustain their crazy, inflated Superman or Wonder Woman images. Giving up that ego would cut everyone’s stress—and transform their leadership too.

Buddhists have long claimed a false belief in the ego is a principle cause of human suffering. I’m inclined to agree with this. In the Buddhist view, there is no ego. It’s a mental concept without true substance, generated by incorrect thinking and a poor grasp of reality. Because it isn’t something that can exist on its own, it must be constantly fed with the three elements in the quotation at the head of this posting: possession, claims of personal “ownership” of events and outcomes, and delusions of control. Exactly the same behavior characterizes most Hamburger Managers.

What happens when a leader can’t have without possessing? Everything becomes his. It’s his team, his authority, his areas of responsibility and command, his decisions alone. No one must be allowed to share his power—or his rewards—so no one can share the burdens either. Any questioning of his decisions becomes a personal attack and proof of disloyalty. To take anything of his away threatens his very existence.

This is a quick route to paranoia and dictatorship. The leader who can’t let go of his ego-driven urge to possess everything can’t accept colleagues, only subordinates. He can’t allow others to do whatever they can do as well—or better—than him, in case that makes him look insufficient. No one can help him, no one can truly support him, because he cannot share anything. In his crazed urge to possess it all, he sets himself up to lose it all instead.

Similarly, the leader who claims every success, every gain, every useful action as hers frustrates all those around her. She cannot do without claiming. It’s all hers—except the failures, of course. She won the order (though she never met the customer); she had that great new idea (after someone else explained it to her); she’s the one solely responsible for exceeding the budget and cutting costs (though her team created the plan, implemented it, and bore the burdens of overwork and long hours).

In reality, all that she’s responsible for (but never claims) is alienating her people, irritating her colleagues, and becoming so filled with inflated ideas of her own importance that she’s a universal pain in the butt. Why is there any need to claim anything? If it’s done—and done well—what more is required? If someone else did it, give them the praise they’re due. Only peoples’ needy, insecure egos demand constant reassurance it’s all down to them.

Good leaders don’t need to exercise control as they lead. People follow them because they want to; because they like, respect, admire, emulate, and even love the leader. There’s no call for rules, enforcement, punishment, and informers: all the paraphernalia of the typical command-and-control, macho culture of many organizations. They have to operate like police states because the leaders’ egos crave the false reassurance that they’re in control. The more any leader resorts to commands and enforcement, the less he or she leads. The ego is calling all the shots.

I’ve drawn these pictures in harsh outlines, but we’ve all suffered under leaders who show some—sometimes most—of these destructive behaviors, at least in less extreme forms. Egotism is a pervasive curse. The claim that all power corrupts is a direct consequence of the malignant ability of an inflated ego to turn a previously pleasant, competent manager into a leadership monster.

True leadership sometimes seems to be a mysterious power—but only because the leader doesn’t appear to do anything except be herself. It looks effortless, yet it’s powerful beyond expectation. She gives away authority, power, position, and recognition as if she has no interest in such possessions—which is true. She also hands out rewards, praise, respect, and support to all who merit them; then receives more in return than she gave away. She has everything, yet claims nothing for herself. She gets everything done, yet points to others as the ones who did it. Ask them and they’ll tell you she was the one responsible. They did it for her, under her oversight, to meet her specifications. She never appears to control anything. There’s no need. Everyone rushes to what what she asks. Better still, they strain to anticipate her wishes before she ever articulates them. They love working for her and they love her. Why? Because she makes them feel wanted, needed, and valued.

Let go of your ego. It’s a burden that you don’t need. Besides, it doesn’t really exist—unless you act as if it does. To achieve the power that enables, not corrupts, stop possessing, claiming, and controlling . . . and try caring and leading instead.

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Technorati tags: leadership, egotism, power, Hamburger Management, slow leadership

Umm . . . Which way now?

Taking time to get the message straight isn’t an indulgence. It’s essential.

General, later President, Ulysses S. Grant was a fine soldier. He was also a precise and lucid communicator. People said that when Grant issued orders, nobody could have the slightest doubt of exactly what he wanted them to do. Sadly, many leaders lack Grant’s clarity in explanation. Throughout Corporate America, people struggle with ambiguous roles, clashing areas of responsibility, muddled instructions, and bosses whose words don’t match their intentions, and whose actions don’t seem to match either. The result is confusion, frustration, and a tremendous waste of time, money, and organizational resources.

Appointing someone to a job is, at its simplest, giving them the instruction to carry out certain tasks and fulfill the associated responsibilities. If this role isn’t clearly described—or if the organization’s understanding and expectations differ from what the role holder understands (let alone from what has been stated openly—it will be impossible for that person to carry out their job correctly. The same goes for objectives and targets. If these aren’t clearly described and understood, the chances of meeting them will be poor. When managers are stressed and harried, their typical response is to give hurried instructions and get on to the next task. And since coming back to clarify or get further informations is often treated as a sign of weakness, stupidity, or plain incompetence, it’s no surprise that many people prefer to do the best they can with whatever faulty or incomplete data is available to them.

The language that many of today’s managers (especially Hamburger Managers, obsessed with speed, cutting corners, and showing off at the same time) use to explain what they want is very often ambiguous, incomplete, and cluttered with jargon. Maybe they don’t know clearly themselves. Maybe they are in too much of a hurry to take the time to work it out, or make sure the other person understands. Maybe they share the foolish assumption that anyone who is competent will be able to work it out for him or herself. Maybe it simply sounds tougher (and is, in reality, so much less demanding) to rap out an instruction and get away before anyone starts asking awkward questions—or suggesting that the target being set is impossible anyway.

People are given instructions and targets that they don’t fully understand, don’t believe are attainable, or interpret in ways that the boss never expected.

A team I knew once attended a workshop where the organization’s senior managers exhorted them to “delight the customer.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what does it mean? The easiest way to delight customers is to give them valuable goods and services for little or nothing in terms of payment. Is that what the top brass intended?

Probably not, but that’s more or less how one or two team members understood what they’d been told. Add all kinds of value and charge nothing for it. The customers loved it—until angry bosses demanded to know why these managers were giving the company’s profits away. Most of those present interpreted it in the light of the old adage: “The customer is always right.” They therefore happily agreed to customer requests and timescales that they knew could not be met, producing angry responses when what they’d promised in the name of “delighting the customer” turned out to disappoint them instead.

These are simple examples, but the problem is widespread. People are given instructions and targets that they don’t fully understand, don’t believe are attainable, or interpret in ways that the boss never expected.

Anyone can set a wildly challenging set of objectives.

What’s needed is for all leaders to take the time to make sure everyone understands what is needed and interprets their tasks in the same way. It’s vital that the boss makes his or her expectations clear and unambiguous; and that those who must fulfill them agree that they are feasible within the time-scales set and the resources available. Anyone can set a wildly challenging set of objectives. But if the people who must fulfill them don’t believe they are possible, they won’t try very hard to make them work.

What would have happened if, instead of being told to “delight the customer,” those team members had been given some practical examples, then asked to come up with their own ideas on the best ways to build strong customer relationships and add value to the company’s products and service?

Instead of a vague exhortation, open to endless interpretation, they would have been given a clear objective; one that was both feasible and likely to be interesting to work on. They would also have been given the message that the organization respected and valued their ideas, experience, and intelligence. Would they know what to do? Certainly. Would they have been interested and confident enough to do it? I believe that they would. Just about everyone values being respected and taken seriously. And if some lacked the knowledge or skills to produce useful ideas, the gap would be clear right away.

People who experience no respect from those above them give none in return.

Every piece of communication in a hierarchy conveys multiple messages. Not just what to do, what’s expected, or who’s responsible. How much time and care is spent on making sure the message is correctly understood also gives a powerful signal of how much respect the organization has for the person receiving it. Research has shown many times that the quickest way to induce stress is to put people in a pressure situation and deny them any control over their responses and action. People who experience no respect from those above them give none in return. Those who have no input to the way their work is organized, allocated, and assessed experience growing tfrustration and alienation.

No general can be successful if his orders aren’t clearly understood by those who have to carry them out. No leader can produce results with a team that’s confused about what she wants them to do. And no organization can operate efficiently if roles are ambiguous, targets are impossible, and the words of the people in charge shrouded in platitudes and jargon.

Clear, respectful communication is a necessity, not an option. Taking the time to get it right is more important to corporate success than almost any other action. Those macho, empty-headed leaders who neglect this part of their job in favor of posturing, kissing up to those above, playing office politics, and blaming their staff for every mistake are incompetent jerks who should be fired. They’re the type who use catch-phrases like: “We have no room for passengers.” That’s true . . . only they are the most useless passengers of all.

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Technorati tags: corporate culture trust respect slow leadership

Workplace “black holes”

Some workplaces are like black holes, sucking in all the energy around and giving nothing back.

Have you ever walked into a place of work—an office, a laboratory, a school, a retail store—and felt your spirits start to flag the moment you passed the door? Felt a kind of weight settle on you: a sense of dullness, gloom, coldness? Experienced trying to deal with people who seem disinterested, uninvolved, too distracted, or too sluggish to do more than the absolute minimum? If so, you’ve just encountered a workplace “black hole.” A phenomenon that becoming more common than it ought to be.

In space, a black hole pulls in all energy, but never lets any back out. However much energy is nearby, it will be pulled into the vortex and then disappear as if it had never existed. A black hole is insatiable. It keeps pulling in more and more energy, absorbing it—then drawing in yet more. In black-hole workplaces, effort, however successful or exceptional, is absorbed as if it had never existed and “rewarded” by demands for still greater effort. Good results are automatically seen as the basis for requiring further and better ones. Achieve your target and it will be instantly increased. Exceed your target, and the bar will be raised still higher Like the real black holes in space, nothing can fill up a black-hole workplace—or even slow down the constant demands for more and more.

All that energy, effort, and hard work goes in, but nothing comes out again. Black holes absorb, they never emit. Black-hole workplaces take all you have to offer—and more—and give little or nothing back. They see payments and benefits as evils to be minimized, training or development as unnecessary costs, and staff numbers as a figure that should always be on the way down. Working there is a grim, draining experience: all work and no play or respite. That’s why staff appear so sluggish and disinterested. They’re too beaten down and exhausted to behave in any other way. In most cases, their every move is watched and their every activity measured against constantly rising targets for individual or team output.

Instead of being respected as a person, you are talked down to, looked down on, distrusted, and treated as a “human resource.”

At the root of the workplace black hole phenomenon is a deep disrespect for people. Employees are expected to focus totally on getting their work, with no time for themselves or “slacking off.” Targets are raised and raised until they become impossible—then raised again. Failure to achieve whatever is demanded is punished. Success is not appreciated, since it is seen as no more than doing what you are paid for. Instead of being respected as a person, you are talked down to, looked down on, distrusted, and treated as a “human resource.” Something to be used and exploited: a cost to be minimized or, if possible, removed altogether by mechanization or outsourcing.

Of course, such organizations disrespect their customers just as much as their employees. The customer is there to be fleeced, manipulated, misinformed, and given as little as possible for his or her money. Price gouging, cartels, and profiteering are all the result of this fundamental disrespect of others.

Fortunately, our universe has stars as well as black holes, and the same is true of the business and organizational world. An organization that is a star energizes everyone who comes into contact with it. Instead of absorbing energy, stars create it. They don’t just respect and honor everyone involved, they give back far more that they take. For the people who work there, it’s a marvelous place that allows them to be themselves, express their creativity, build a career that they can be proud of, and—above everything else—have fun. That fundamental trust and respect of employees and customers shines through like light from the brightest star. If you need help, it’s given with pleasure and care. Employees clearly show that it’s a pleasure to work there, and that communicates itself to customers too. Black holes de-energize their whole environment. Stars pour out energy that lights up a wide area around.

is your workplace a star or a black hole? Is it founded on respect and trust—or disrespect, suspicion, and exploitation? The only sensible way to deal with a black hole is to get as far away from it as possible, before it sucks you dry. Whatever lurks, unseen, at the center of its vortex will go on drawing in energy, work, profits, effort—endlessly. An economy based on multiple black holes will suck energy and money from everywhere else and return nothing. A country based on black-hole organizations will try to suck the rest of the world dry.

We’re constantly exhorted to reach for the stars. In the organizational world, that makes excellent sense. There are stars out there. If you can find one to work in, you’ll find that every working day brings you more energy and fun. Why accept anything less?

Just stay away from the black holes.

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Technorati tags: corporate culture profiteering business ethics trust respect slow leadership

News and Views: April 7th 2007

Numbers, Schnumbers!

I’ve written before about the futility of relying solely on numerical measurements as the basis for management. Now confirmation of this viewpoint comes from a study by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu that states: “Top executives too often have tunnel vision when it comes to gauging the health and performance of their organizations, becoming obsessed with crunching the numbers while overlooking critical non-financial information.” Since Deloitte’s are accountants, this is quite an admission! It seems 90% of top executives thought that their information about the financial health of their organization was good; but less than a third said the same about all the other indicators of business health: customer satisfaction, innovation, competitiveness, and employee commitment. Another case of “never mind the quality, feel the width?” [link]

To sleep, perchance to dream . . . about the office?

A survey of New Zealand and Australian workers has found that job stress is affecting people’s dreams.The online survey of 770 workers, carried out by a Melbourne-based legal and accounting firm MSI, found 70 percent of respondents think about work while they sleep. The survey’s researchers think this is a sign of stress. I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to find a way of making people actually work while asleep? [link]

Maybe Mom doesn’t know best.

Here’s a statement by a mother from Palo Alto, CA, almost the cradle of high technology: “It is our responsibility to talk to our nieces, daughters, younger sisters about the path they are choosing at a young age and how it might affect their ability to balance work and life at a later stage.” The writer of the blog that quoted this adds her own take: “I work in technology, and not a week goes by that I don’t wish someone had talked to me about choosing a career that would allow me a satisfying work/life balance. Okay, I admit that in my late-teen years and early twenties, a discussion about how I should think about studying something that would allow me to come home make dinner every night for my husband and children would have fallen on deaf ears! But...god, if someone had at least clued me into the fact that certain professions are more amenable to having some balance/peace of mind...it could have been really enlightening!” Read the comment from a Program Manager who cut her working hours from 60+ to 40, just by cutting out wasted time. Full marks for honesty and good sense! [link]

The opposite point of view.

It’s good to look at ideas from people who think the whole work/life balance thing is a confidence trick or a piece of trendy nonsense. For example, “Life at the Bar“ boldly states that work/life balance is nonsense. Despite the provocative title, the text itself is far more measured, focusing on the need for each individual to construct a balance between work and the rest of life that fits their needs: “Look for a way to have a satisfying career and a satisfying personal life, but don’t expect it to be an easy or static path, and don’t expect what works for one lawyer to work for another.” In a post with the fascinating title “Hot Worms and Workaholics: Let the Workers Be!” the writer attacks the “health terrorists” whose “ pathogenic view causes us not to see a healthy forest because we are too busy looking for diseased trees.” I wasn't convinced, but I enjoyed the argument. [link]

CEO . . . with or without kids?

Penelope Trunk is challenging the prevailing “you can have it all” idea again with this post. She begins: “Climbing to the top of corporate America requires near complete abnegation of one’s personal life, not in a sacrificial way, but in a child-like way. In most cases, when there are children, there is a wife at home taking care of the executive’s life in the same way she takes care of the children’s lives.This is not a judgment on whether people should have kids. It’s fine to choose not to have kids. This is a judgment on whether people with kids should be CEOs of large companies.” I certainly find myself nodding in agreement when she says: “People who create careers that allow them to assume large levels of authority in their personal life are living as responsible adults. People who concentrate on work and delegate maintenance of all other aspects of their personal life are not truly living as adults.’ Take a look at her arguments. [link]

Low-value bureaucrats?

Vince Thompson has a new manifesto on ChangeThis. He says: “. . . more than half of the managers leading teams today are ready to walk out the door—leaving their teams, their companies, and for some, if necessary, their homes and communities, behind in hopes of making a fresh start elsewhere. This came as shocking news to some business leaders. But many managers had seen it building for years—years in which managers in The Middle have been displaced by technology, de-positioned by consultants, handcuffed by red tape, distracted by mergers, spoofed in the media and denigrated as low-value bureaucrats.” Heady stuff! Whether or not you agree with his solutions, it makes interesting reading. [link]

Is this normal?

Here’s John Blackwell, questioning whether organizations have woken up yet to the changing nature of work: “No one goes to work for the good of their health. However, in the 21st century should we really be accepting that our work has demonstrably harmful effects on our wellbeing? Far too many employers assume that stressful working conditions are a necessary evil if they are to remain productive and profitable. Yet there’s now unanimous acknowledgment of the direct interaction between sustainable employee health and the construct of the workplace.” Not an easy read—too many different ideas packed into a single article—but worth a look. [link]

The American jerk epidemic.

Bob Sutton’s articles are always worth reading and this one is no exception. He points out that:” A study of American workers released today found that nearly half have worked for an abusive boss. “ Since Hamburger Management encourages mindless, macho behavior— and has become the management style of choice for many organizations—I’m not at all surprised. Is the only way to stem this epidemic of uncivilized, self-destructive behavior to let loose the lawyers? Maybe. But I still retain some vestiges of hope that sanity will prevail first. [link]

Testosterone poisoning?

On the same site, Bob has another post noting that what he mentioned as a kind of joke in his book—the idea that bad behavior is due to testosterone poisoning—turns out to be true. It seems that people with high levels of testosterone actually enjoy angry expressions and seek ways to provoke them. [link]

Trust you, boss? I’d rather trust this rattlesnake.

Trust is another element of a civilized working environment that seems to be in increasingly short supply. According to research by consultancy Watson Wyatt in Canada, workers, whatever their age, have a lot in common when it comes to attitudes to those in charge: “Fewer than half of workers—whatever their age—trust their organization’s leaders, with a nearly six out of 10 believing that bosses rarely respond to questions with a straight answer.” The same study found a clear link between employee engagement and a company’s financial performance, with those companies with high employee engagement levels demonstrating better total annual returns to shareholders, higher market premiums, and higher productivity levels than those with low engagement. Make sense to you? Makes sense to me. [link]

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Jam today . . . or caviar tomorrow?

Business leaders used to be compared to robber barons. Now some of them are more like greedy children or small-time gangsters.

Instant gratification is a hallmark of many of today’s organizations, headed by a slew of people following the shabby tenets of Hamburger Management. Sadly, there’s no sign that these organizations will grow out of their obsession; or that the financial institutions that fund them will encourage them to do so. This type of infantile behavior isn’t seen for what it is—a pathological prolonging of childish attitudes. In fact, people are encouraged to see it as perfectly normal. Why?

David Maister raises some interesting questions (“The Long Term”) about people’s inability to get past their urge towards instant gratification to do what is best for their own long-term interest. He writes:

In much of my recent thinking (and writing) I have observed that our biggest barrier, as individuals and as organizations, is the difficulty in doing what is in our long-term best interest, not just what provides immediate gratification . . . it is part of the human condition that we can know what to do, why we should do it, and even how to do things for which we fervently desire the benefits. None of that actually predicts that we actually are going to do what we absolutely know is good for us.

To say that this is equally, if not more, true of organizations is to state the obvious. The insane emphasis on quarterly earnings as almost the sole measure of business success is all about instant gratification. What may be in the longer-term interests of shareholders and the organization itself scarcely comes into the picture.

For organizations and individuals, it’s hard to resist the lure of “jam today” in favor of some future benefit that is, probably, far less certain. Taking the longer-term view used to be seen as a mark of maturity. Only children were expected to grab for immediate rewards. Adults saved money for the future, invested in pension plans, and considered short and long-term consequences before committing to some course of action.

What went wrong?

I suspect that much of today’s infantilism stems from a trend towards a consumer-based economy. Marketers and sales people don’t want customers to wait and think about their purchases. They don’t want them to set aside money in savings, when they could be spending it—right now—on buying products. From time to time, governments and financial gurus shake their heads over the problems caused by easy credit, but it’s really all their own doing. In the urge to sell more and more consumer products, credit is essential—and the easier the better. People quickly exhaust their current income (some still has to be spent on food and other necessities). Then they must either wait to save enough to make the next “big box” purchase, or borrow money to do so. Borrowing money not only makes the sale right away; it’s also a further opportunity to profit through the interest charged on the loan.

Somehow the consumer society manages to combine a puritanical obsession with working with a totally hedonistic devotion to getting whatever you want in as short a time as possible.

Yet capitalism itself is all about putting off gratification for the sake of greater long-term profit through investment. Instead of taking all their cash and having a truly memorable blow-out in some exotic location, entrepreneurs and capitalists are expected to invest their money and wait for bigger rewards some time in the future. Instant gratification is also the antithesis of America’s favorite attitude to life: the Puritan Work Ethic. If you truly accepted having it all and having it now as your goal, you would never go to work. Somehow the consumer society manages to combine a puritanical obsession with working with a totally hedonistic devotion to getting whatever you want in as short a time as possible.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of a consumer society, it was, of course, inevitable that the attitudes produced should spill over into the rest of life.

Management practices are not immune from this process. Training and developing staff can be a long-term business—far too long-term for your average Hamburger Manager, who demands that everyone should “hit the ground running” or suffer the consequences. Developing sensible organizational strategies takes much more time than putting up a Powerpoint presentation of slogans and platitudes—or, better still, copying what some other, supposedly successful, organization is doing. Imitation may or may not be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s a hell of a lot quicker than crafting ideas that exactly fit the needs of your own organization. Raising short-term profits by cutting costs provides almost instant returns, even if the longer-term impact may be dire. Raising them by improving products, service, or competitiveness takes a whole lot more time and effort—never mind that it’s the only way to create a sustainable future.

Only those that set aside infantile ideas of instant gratification and short-termism will make it through to influence and shape the future.

Maybe what we are seeing is Darwinian evolution at work. The mass of short-term, grab-and-go organizations and managers won’t have the staying power to survive. Only those that set aside infantile ideas of instant gratification and short-termism will make it through to influence and shape the future. For the rest, extinction will come far sooner than they expect—and much, much sooner that they would wish.

Short-termism is an infectious disease that has been slowly choking the life and creativity out of our organizations. There's only one cure: to slow down, take a careful look at risks and rewards, and stop the slavish addiction to managing by numbers alone. Growing a business is like growing anything else. It takes time, and rushing it is more likely to produce a disaster than something that will go on growing. The attitudes of Hamburger Management have more in common with the methods of gangsters than entrepreneurs: get in quick, grab as much as you can, and get as far away as possible before trouble arrives. Is that what we want to see in boardrooms and executive suites?

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Technorati tags: short-termism instant gratification Hamburger Management corporate culture risk and reward slow leadership

Taking a positive view of procrastination

Putting things off may be a sign that you haven’t done what you need to do to make a firm decision

I’m amazed how many blog postings, articles, e-books, and books there are claiming to cure procrastination. It must be a global pandemic, worse than bird flu could ever be. If there are enough people who habitually procrastinate to justify so many words and prescriptions, it’s a miracle any work is done at all. Yet is procrastination always a failing? What if it’s telling you something that you need to hear?

Hardly anyone ever looks at the positive benefits of procrastination. There seems to be a universal assumption it’s an almost moral failing to be eradicated. Perhaps that’s because of the prevalence of the Puritan Work Ethic. Procrastination is assumed to derive from laziness; and there’s no greater sin in the Puritan Work Ethic Catalog of Deadly Sins than laziness. And if it’s not laziness that’s the problem, it’s poor organization. Use this or that planning tool and never procrastinate again! Whipping up concern about procrastination is a wonderful marketing ploy for anyone with something like that to sell.

But are laziness or poor organization the only reasons for procrastination? Sure, both happen sometimes, but many of the “cures” put forward for poor organization are so simple it’s hard to believe people haven’t already tried them—even if they didn’t buy the expensive software yet. (It used to be planner diaries, but now it’s software. Same difference.) And while some people are lazy, I’m not at all sure that it’s as prevalent as all those anti-procrastination urgings would suggest.

I’m more interested in the reasons why people procrastinate. When you consider those, it seems procrastination may often be a sensible, even essential, response. Here are some possible reasons:

• One of the commonest reasons for putting something off until later is fear: fear of making a fool of yourself, fear of getting it wrong, fear of doing something you know that you can’t do properly. Fear is our natural warning system. It may be rational or irrational, but it should always cause you to slow down and think before going further.
  
  Is the fear imaginary or real? Many are imaginary. You conjure up all kinds of potentially bad situations in your mind, then convince yourself they’re bound to happen. Total nonsense, of course. Still, you may have benefited by the moment’s pause to consider them and dismiss them as foolish. But not all fears are illusory. Some are warnings of real pitfalls ahead; problems you would do well to consider in advance. In such cases, procrastination may save you from serious harm.


• Next there’s that uneasy feeling you get about some choices. They seem sensible, but there’s a niggling question in the back of your mind. Something about them doesn’t feel right. So you procrastinate.
  
  That’s entirely rational behavior. If something doesn’t feel right—and you aren’t absolutely forced into instant action—it’s logical to hold back until you can resolve the problem. Using some planning tool to override your unformed concerns isn’t a good idea. Once again, there may be nothing to worry about. But if there is, far better to take your time and get it straight first. Another plus for procrastination.


• You may also procrastinate because you suspect that you aren’t ready to handle something. Yet another good reason to wait. Or because you didn’t do the necessary preparatory work and think you might be caught out by lack of preparation. Or because you aren’t sure you’ve considered all the options. All excellent reasons for delay. All positive kinds of procrastination.


• Another common cause of holding back occurs when you believe you ought to do something, but you don’t want to do it. Surely this is a situation where pushing past your urge to procrastinate is essential?
  
  Hold on a little. Why don’t you want to do it? You might be right to hold back. There are many cases where all those “shoulds” or “oughts” have no rational basis. They’re there because it’s the conventional thing to do, or someone else is pushing you to fit their agenda, or because of some rigid dogma or traditional belief. None of these make them right. If something is holding you back, you should at least explore it properly before allowing yourself to be bulldozed into action by a “should” or an “ought.” Take it as another warning and act on it.


• Then there’s one of the commonest reasons: pressure. There’s someone, usually the boss, driving you on to do something that you don’t believe is right, or even sensible. You’ve raised your objections, but have been told to keep quiet and do what you’re told. Maybe you’re under pressure to make sure “the numbers” look right, but you know that isn’t in the organization’s best interests longer term. Is it right to delay? Or should you forget your scruples and comply? Not an easy decision, and one that almost anyone would want to take time over.

Poor planning is, I believe, rarely the problem. Why? Because almost nobody has a difficulty with organizing themselves to do whatever they want to do—and I mean truly want, not just feel they ought to. Nor do they have any problem making the effort required, or maintaining it long enough to get results.

Many years ago, I was told this story by a policeman in Birmingham, England. The newspapers had been full of dire warnings about the terrible state of local schoolchildrens’ understanding of simple arithmetic. Everything was blamed, from incompetent teaching to laziness amongst pupils and apathy from parents. My policeman friend didn’t believe a word of it. He told me about a young man he’d arrested many times for various betting scams. This boy (he was fifteen) had almost no education and could barely read or write. Ask him any normal math problem and he’d be lost. But he could calculate betting odds, and the pay-out on the most complicated multiple series of linked bets, in the blink of an eye. No mistakes. What he truly wanted to do, he did. The rest meant nothing to him.

Before you sweep your hesitation aside, stop and think. What may it be telling you? Is it just laziness and disorganization? Or are you being rushed into something that is making you feel uneasy—perhaps with very good reason.

One of the worst aspects of many organizational cultures is the over-emphasis on action and related denial of the importance of taking time to reflect fully before making any important decisions. Rushing intro something unprepared, or with too little consideration, is hardly a sound basis for success. Yet tens of thousands of people have swallowed the idea that, to be a good leader, you have to be willing to take snap decisions on just about everything. There are even books extolling the supposed merits of the process: making decisions in the blink of an eye, rather than taking the time needed to consider options and alternatives properly. Against a measure like that, almost any response other than an instant one looks like procrastination. Perhaps that’s why it suddenly seems to be so prevalent.

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Technorati tags: procrastination decision making decisions choices getting things done GTD slow leadership

The right direction for civilized work

Mutual respect, not macho posturing, is the true basis for business success

Business has no room any more for the kind of short-sighted, closed-minded autocrat who sees people as merely “employment units,” to be bought as cheaply as possible and used with ruthless disregard for their welfare until they are replaced by others, fresher and less wounded. That’s how plantation owners treated their slaves 150 years ago. It was a disreputable way of operating then and nothing has changed to make it any more acceptable. Isn’t it time that we demanded better from our business leaders? Isn’t it time that they stopped destroying wealth by clinging to outdated leadership notions and came into the 21st century?

On Sunday last, Bob Sutton had this to say on his blog:

Today’s New York Times has a glowing review of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, by Bill George (Former CEO of Medtronic, a Jim Collins “Good to Great” leader, and now a Professor at Harvard Business School teaching leadership), with help from Peter Sims. The book is based on interviews with 125 other leaders and executives like Starbuck’s Howard Schultz and Xerox’s Ann Mulcahy. These cases—in combination with George’s accomplishments—show that leaders who create humane organizations that really care about their people and their customers—and don’t just view them as units that exist for the purposes of extracting “as much economic value as possible” every minute of every day—not only can thrive financially, they do it in such a way that people can travel through their days with dignity [My italics]. And as George shows with his cases of successful leaders, they can also have a life outside of work.

For years, management orthodoxy has been based on the idea that the key to business success lay in controlling costs, especially the costs of employing people. Employ as few people as possible, pay them as little as you can, and work them as hard as you can get away with. And if employment costs and laws in the developed world are becoming an issue, ship the work to somewhere in the Third World, where workers will accept a pittance and there are few, if any, laws to regulate corporate behavior.

This is the orthodoxy that has created Hamburger Management. Bob Sutton, along with Bill George and many other successful leaders, are doing us a marvelous service by pointing out how foolish and short-sighted it is. As a business creed, the “minimizing costs is everything” school leads to management barbarism, contempt for customers (think of most airlines today), and fat-cat executives caught out in dubious schemes and ethical blunders of all kinds. It’s the thinking behind companies firing experienced staff and replacing them with cheap newcomers. And it doesn’t only stink as a way of handling employees, it’s bad for business.

According to Management Issues:

. . . a study by insurance and financial services company MetLife has found that keeping key workers happy, challenged and motivated is becoming more important to U.S businesses than controlling costs. Employee retention was identified as the most important priority by more than half of employers overall polled, with retailers (62 per cent) and the service sector (59 per cent) placing an even greater emphasis on the need to retain people.

The conventional cost-cutting, macho, grab-and-go managers are stuck in the past; in a time when employees were mostly interchangeable, whether they shoveled coal, shuffled paper, or handed out goods in a store. Sure, some did the job better than others, but the differences weren’t too great. The job saw to that, since work was mostly fairly simple, repetitious, and could be learned quite quickly.

There are decreasing numbers of jobs that nearly anyone can do quickly, and rapidly increasing demands for the kind of people who are in shortest supply: the most able, the most highly-skilled, and the most inventive and passionate about what they do.

Nearly all those jobs have already been swept away by machines and computers. Even the job of a foot-soldiers in today's armies takes considerable training. That's why few, if any, generals are in favor of the draft: they have little need for large numbers of untrained, unwilling recruits. By the time draftees were sufficiently trained to be useful, their draft period would be over. Business is no different. There are decreasing numbers of jobs that nearly anyone can do quickly, and rapidly increasing demands for the kind of people who are in shortest supply: the most able, the most highly-skilled, and the most inventive and passionate about what they do.

What’s left is mostly professional work, demanding extensive skills, high intelligence, and (if you are to beat the competition) creativity and ingenuity. To be good, people need considerable training. You can’t lose them and pick someone up on the street tomorrow as a replacement. Professional staff replacement is expensive, chancy, and creates a drag on the business that no one needs. In the same article quoted above, another survey is mentioned, covering 11,852 employees. It found more than 60 percent of employees were planning to look for a new job in the next three months, nearly double the proportion that employers believed were looking.

I’ve been arguing for a while that managers and leaders who engage in Hamburger Management aren’t just jerks; they’re actively harming the businesses that they work for.

There has been a saying around for many years that, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Today, if you treat people like sh*t, they leave; and the only ones you’ll get to replace them will be out of the door too, as soon as they find that the fine words of recruiters aren’t matched by actual experience. Patricia Soldati quotes The Conference Board to assert that:

. . . employee engagement is a very big deal. There is clear and mounting evidence that high levels of employee engagement keenly correlates to individual, group and corporate performance in areas such as retention, turnover, productivity, customer service and loyalty. And this is not just by small margins. While differences varied from study to study, highly engaged employees outperform their disengaged counterparts by a whopping 20 – 28 percentage points!

I’ve been arguing for a while that managers and leaders who engage in Hamburger Management aren’t just jerks; they’re actively harming the businesses that they work for. It’s nice to have some proof from a highly reputable source like The Conference Board.

Uncivilized modes of leadership destroy wealth, as well as destroying the peace of mind of the people subjected to them. It’s high time that business schools stopped teaching old-style management ideas, stemming from Taylor’s “scientific management,” as anything other than a historical curiosity and a dreadful warning; much like you learn in history about the French Revolution and the guillotine. And it’s long past the time when any executive who fails to create a civilized working atmosphere, and high levels of creativity and engagement in his or her team, can be allowed to stay in a responsible position.

If shareholders want to maintain and create real wealth—as opposed to gambling on random stock movements, which is what many of them do—they should seriously consider forcing the necessary changes in the management of the companies whose shares they hold. After all, it’s their money that these macho jerks are wasting.

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Technorati tags: staff turnover retention talent war for talent leadership civilized work slow leadership

Hamburger Management and the culture of fear

Dictators always suppress dissent. Corporate ones are no different.

Few things in this life are black-and-white, however much some managers try to make them so. Unquestioning loyalty easily becomes ethical blindness. When it does, it is no loyalty at all. Sometimes what the boss most needs is to hear the truth, before he or she says or does something that will bring harm. Besides, our freedom to question and to disagree is too important to be sacrificed in the trivial cause of helping to free our organizational masters from the discomforts and challenges of being questioned and held to account.

Is loyalty to the boss and the company always admirable? In today’s business climate, positive rebellion may already be essential if you’re not to lose out in global competition. Too much emphasis on loyalty can stifle creativity and dull people’s willingness to tell the truth about themselves and their work. Competitors ought to love overly loyal organizations, because no one there will be ready to rock the boat by pointing out how fast they’re becoming sluggish and obsolete.

Here’s the problem. Too much disloyalty is disruptive and destroys trust; yet unquestioning loyalty usually means that important issues may be suppressed until it’s too late. Getting the right balance between the loyalty necessary for corporate cohesiveness and the dissent that has to be encouraged to stimulate personal initiative isn’t as simple as it sounds. Tightly-knit teams are good for support, but very bad for encouraging initiative, creativity, and truth-telling. We need those people who are ready to look with different—even potentially disloyal—eyes and bring uncomfortable reality into the open. Without them, corporations and leaders get fat, dumb, and happy—until the dam breaks and disaster is all around them.

If the boss is already harassed and stressed, he or she is likely to be much more intolerant of opposition or questioning.

Dictators—political or organizational—are always surrounded by “yes-men” eager to prove their loyalty by saying whatever the person in power will find most acceptable. In such circumstances, the pressure to fit in and suppress unpleasant realities can be overwhelming. Haste and speed also put pressure on dissent of any kind. Instant acceptance is quick and easy. Coping with questions, objections, or alternatives takes time and effort. If the boss is already harassed and stressed, he or she is likely to be much more intolerant of opposition or questioning. And that’s without the added pressure of an organizational culture that is itself hostile to questioning of any kind.

Hamburger Management is obsessed with speed, simplicity, and managerial power. Hamburger Managers typically require unquestioning loyalty, and prize team players far more highly than individualists, whose curiosity and innovative thoughts may force those in charge to defend their decisions. Dissent of any kind is uncomfortable in such a culture. Skeptics who challenge whatever the boss has come to believe is expedient will soon find themselves moving elsewhere. Such irritating people deserve it, in the view of those in charge, because they waste time questioning things that the rest have already decided—or maybe don’t want to look at too closely.

When a culture prizes “loyalty” above all else, fear becomes the dominant emotion. Fear of doing or saying anything that might draw down punishment. Fear of “rocking the boat” or speaking out of turn. It’s too easy to brush objections aside on the spurious grounds that “there isn’t time” to consider anything else. Too easy to suppress individual freedom to think and speak in the cause of quick profits and the minimization of delays and costs. Organizations that have become badly infected with Hamburger Management produce exactly such a culture. No time to think, no time to deal with questions, no wish to consider alternatives, so closed-minded that dissent can no longer be tolerated.

Organizations full of “yes-men,” run by leaders obsessed with personal power and profit, are interested only in the most immediate results and so throw themselves headlong down today’s typically competitive, uncertain business path, beset with problems and difficulties, with their eyes tight shut. Mostly they deal with difficulties by either ignoring them or trying to blast through them by a deadly combination of brute force and willful ignorance. They’re tough guys, aren’t they? They stop for nothing . . . until something stops them—dead.

There is a way to reconcile loyalty with openness to uncomfortable truth. It’s based on requiring ethical choices, not unthinking or unquestioning loyalty.

Before all the unthinking assumptions built into Hamburger Management cause the organization to buckle, then break, under the combined weight of problems ignored and changes sidestepped, there may still be time to draw back and avert disaster. What it takes is slowing down enough to think. It also needs enough trust and tolerance for eccentricities that people become willing to draw problems to the boss’s attention in time to make a difference. Those “disloyal” whistle-blowers who reveal hidden corruption and deceit are important and valuable folk, often moved by a stronger sense of ethics and duty than the rest of us. they shouldn’t be suppressed or punished. They should be seen as the “canaries in the coal mine:” a vital early-warning system of a build-up of dangerous corporate gases.

There is a way to reconcile loyalty with openness to uncomfortable truth. It’s based on requiring ethical choices, not unthinking or unquestioning loyalty. When people work through the ethics of trust and support for boss and peers, it’s possible to see where the balance lies between being honest (even if that involves dissent) and being truly disloyal.

Loyalty has long been prized by leaders. To be disloyal to one’s superiors is typically seen as offensive and culpable. The more authoritarian and dogmatic the leaders, the more they tend to prize loyalty above other traits in their followers. Hamburger Management often produces a culture where loyalty is so obsessively demanded that it produces a culture of fear: a place where anything other than total, unquestioning obedience to those in charge is seen as intolerable. And that, I believe, is not the least of its many curses.

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Technorati tags: Hamburger Management corporate culture authoritarian leadership loyalty fear questioning slow leadership

Unscientific management

Decision making by data collection isn’t management. It isn’t even sensible.

The current-day obsession with data and measurement is part of a supposedly “scientific” approach to management and decision making. Yet our equal obsession with speed and cutting corners ensures that choices are often made without taking enough time to weigh all the evidence, test it for validity, or even consider its true meaning. To parody Sir Winston Churchill: “Never in the history of human leadership has so much been measured by so many for so little resulting clarity.”

We live in an age that prizes data and measurement to an almost obsessive degree. Computers have increased our ability to collect and process information by many orders of magnitude. Almost every special interest group, from political parties to social action groups and trade associations, trot out yet another slew of survey results whenever they wish to make a point or attract the attention of the media. No one seems to stop to ask what use we are making of all this data. Do we even know if it’s correct? Or what it means?

The media report all the often conflicting survey results with gleeful interest. Survey stories fill air-time and column inches. You can nearly always find some nugget in them to create a jaw-dropping headline. Never mind that today’s survey contradicts yesterday’s. The public attention span is assumed to be too short to care—or maybe even to notice.

Surveys and statistical studies have long been the stock-in-trade of academics. You publish your results, others test and criticize them, and—slowly—knowledge inches forward. If what you report fails to stand up to analysis and replication by your peers, it is rejected. You are an expert writing for experts. They demand solid evidence and unshakeable methodology. This process is the foundation of the scientific method.

Thanks to Powerpoint, presentations contain carefully chosen summaries—little more than headlines designed to produce an emotional reaction, not an analytical one.

In organizations, much of the data is collected and analyzed by amateurs. The methods used are often poorly understood. Once available, results are use more politically than scientifically: to justify individual points of view, support pet projects, or wave in the face of opponents. What supports a case is seized up. Often there is no one to question it, since any “inconvenient” findings are quietly hidden away. Thanks to Powerpoint, presentations contain carefully chosen summaries—little more than headlines designed to produce an emotional reaction, not an analytical one.

It is the aura of scientific respectability that makes the day-to-day use of numerical data and survey results so attractive—and so dangerous. The results printed in the media, or reported in tens of thousands of Powerpoint presentations in corporations every day, are not delivered to be checked, questioned, or challenged. They are to be believed. All the scientific (or pseudo-scientific) trappings are used to foster an unquestioning acceptance of the supposed findings. The hearer or reader is subtly reminded that they are ill-informed amateurs being addressed by experts possessing all the data. This isn’t science. It’s marketing and PR “spin” wrapped in scientific garb. It’s a very aggressive wolf trying to pretend it’s a harmless, scientific sheep.

In today’s hyper-competitive climate, no one wants to admit that they understood barely one word in five . . .

In the workplace, more and more data is demanded, processed, and used to justify various points of view. Do those making decisions based on presentations of this data understand it? Do they have the knowledge, or the time, to question its validity—or even reflect on what else it might be pointing to, in place of whatever they have been told to believe? Is there any opportunity given for fact-checking or attempts to replicate the findings?

The answer to all these questions is usually “no”. Haste is endemic. Executives are expected to make virtually instant decisions. Most of them are too overwhelmed with data, let alone all the other demands that they face, to do more than accept what their “experts” tell them. In today’s hyper-competitive climate, no one wants to admit that they understood barely one word in five; or that they have virtually no grasp of statistics and can be bamboozled by almost any set of plausible-seeming figures.

Worse, yet, many of the “experts” producing and presenting this data are consultants, and expensive ones at that. When you pay millions to get a report from a consulting firm, you aren’t usually disposed to question or reject the results. And the more that you’ve paid for the consultants’ findings, the less willing that you are even to consider that your money might have been wasted.

What does it take to make sure of a sensible level of fact-checking, critical analysis, and consideration of all this data, let alone the conclusions that you are told that it supports?

In management decision making, all data ought really to be presumed false or misleading until proven factual.

It takes time and the willingness to regard all proposals, however enthusiastically presented and wrapped in “scientific” analysis of data, with initial skepticism. In our judicial systems, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty (though try getting the media to respect that). In management decision making, all data ought really to be presumed false or misleading until proven factual; and all proposals supported by data, however superficially convincing, should be the subject of deep suspicion until proper independent evidence is produced.

Time and skepticism: the very heart of Slow Leadership. Without them, managers and executives are almost helpless against manipulation by special interests and confusion by data overload. A glut of macho Hamburger Managers, all primed with endless ambition and eager to appear decisive, coupled with silly workloads and a corporate obsession with instant gratification, is a terrifying prospect. It’s like putting a group of manic two-year olds in charge of your trust fund.

Hardly a recipe for sound, truly scientific decision-making, is it?

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