This entry is more along the lines of a “pet peeve” than some great management insight. But please bear with us because it’s important to get this off our chests.
Have you ever noticed that one of the quickest ways a manager (or anyone, for that matter) can end a dialogue, particularly one concerning a point of disagreement, is to pronounce your point of view “countrary to human nature”? This assertion is presented as being definitive, unarguable, sacrosanct, and therefore, finally determinative of any point under discussion. Once this decree has been uttered, any further disagreement or challenge may simply be viewed as argumentative and insubordinate. The issue has now been decided once and for all, by fiat and undeniable truth, hasn’t it?
Resorting to this argument, in our estimation, simply avoids having to confront or deal with any criticisms of the status quo, recommendations for change, or counterpoints to prior assertions. It is all that is left to be said when the manager runs out of valid and cogent counterarguments to your proposition. But its message is clear: leave it alone.
To what extent do you view your manager or supervisor as a great student of human nature? When he or she blurts out in the context of a debate something like “human beings are by nature competitive animals, and therefore trying to put together incentives for group cooperation is a waste of time,” how often do you actually find yourself in agreement with the manager’s pronouncement? Do you sit and question the degree to which you actually believe his or her statement and the conclusions implicit in it?
How many supervisors have actually been educated to any extent on the “nature” of human beings? Are they literate in the most recent scientific findings concerning human perception, human psychological development, human motivation, or attitude and belief formation. Or has most of their learning come through the “school of hard knocks,” whereby virtually all of their conclusions about human nature have been filtered through their old work environments’ cultures. Aren’t they simply bearing witness to the way things have always been in the worlds in which they’ve survived in the past and figured out ways to succeed? How much of their experience and personal evolution has been fueled by environments that encouraged individual learning and growth, risk-taking, experimentation, and continuous formal education. Is their pronouncement simply more along the lines of “we’ve always done it that way,” or “better not challenge the status quo if you know what’s good for you”?
We would argue that it’s not far-fetched to claim that it is human nature to defecate in the woods, if history is any guide of how humans behaved for thousands years before the advent of fixed communities and plumbing. Nevertheless, humans have evolved over the millennia with the advent of ideas such as civility, cleanliness, cooperation, and social responsibility. One of the great advantages of being human is that, unlike other creatures in the animal world, we are not saddled once and for all with our instinctual behaviors. Nor do we have to be slaves to prescriptions justified by pronouncements that they correspond with “human nature.” We can actually use our cerebral cortexes to develop new ideas and ways of thinking and acting that generate more positive and effective outcomes in the world.
Showing posts with label dialogue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dialogue. Show all posts
Monday, February 12, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
The “Openness” Myth
John was sitting on a weekly departmental “all hands” phone call when the question was asked by the general manager, “How valuable did you find the 2-hour web training session that was conducted yesterday by the IT department?” After some brief hesitation by all the participants, someone eventually pipes up to say that he thought the training was quite well done and very valuable for all of the participants. You smile to yourself because you know that the training was horrible: the trainer failed to present the material cogently and succinctly; the trainer offered no context for the material being presented; and, the material seemed to be presented disjointedly, in random order, without observations about the relative importance of different elements, and with little explanation as to its use cases. What do you do now? Should you say something?
Well, what you do depends largely on the culture of your organization. If it’s permissible to be honest and open about how you felt, diplomatically of course, you voice your concerns over what you think was missing from the training and make suggestions on how to improve it. You also acknowledge your appreciation for the effort made, but suggest concrete ways in which it could have provided greater benefit to you.
If it’s not permissible to be open and honestly critical of the effort made by another employee, then you simply parrot the same positive refrain issued by the first commenter and let it go at that. In fact, to do otherwise might be viewed as openly challenging or confrontational by the first commenter, who might therefore be offended by your “flagrant” contradiction. So, you refrain from saying what you think; you try to figure out what to say and how to say it so as not to offend the original speaker or the trainer. Or maybe you just waffle and slur some comments in ways that make them largely indecipherable.
Many companies take great pride in what they consider to be their open and honest work environments. But underneath management’s affirmations of these core values and beliefs--honesty and openness--often lies much withholding of sincere dialogue, innovative ideas, suggestions for process improvements, and valid criticisms of current process and policies. People ultimately disengage from the company meetings and supervisor dialogues for three primary reasons: (1) they know that their comments and suggestions will largely be ignored; (2) they realize that their ideas and contributions will be dismissed without explanation or exploration, because that’s what has always happened, or (3) they come to resent management’s “air” of indifference and condescension for anything that challenges the norm. Without the ability to make open and sincere contributions to the company’s body of knowledge and to influence how things are done, people will eventually withdraw from making such offerings. Once this happens, the company loses not only the immediate opportunities for individual and collective performance improvements, but it begins to stifle the development of its employees’ potential through their disengagement from improving the organization and any real long-term organizational learning.
In all honesty, ask yourself the following questions: How often does you manager solicit ideas and feedback from you and others about what's happening inside the organization? In what ways specifically do your supervisor and senior managers work to create a climate of openness, honesty, and trust with respect to the feedback they solicit? Do they then comment directly on the observations, criticisms and recommendations you make; give them due consideration and provide you with their perceptions and conclusions in return; or simply listen and then ignore everything you’ve said, with no explanation? What kinds of dialogues are held around your offerings? How are people rewarded and recognized for such contributions? How does your supervisor react when people’s recommendations or comments appear to contradict the mainstream thinking? Depending on your answer to these questions, your organization may be learning a lot or nothing at all.
Well, what you do depends largely on the culture of your organization. If it’s permissible to be honest and open about how you felt, diplomatically of course, you voice your concerns over what you think was missing from the training and make suggestions on how to improve it. You also acknowledge your appreciation for the effort made, but suggest concrete ways in which it could have provided greater benefit to you.
If it’s not permissible to be open and honestly critical of the effort made by another employee, then you simply parrot the same positive refrain issued by the first commenter and let it go at that. In fact, to do otherwise might be viewed as openly challenging or confrontational by the first commenter, who might therefore be offended by your “flagrant” contradiction. So, you refrain from saying what you think; you try to figure out what to say and how to say it so as not to offend the original speaker or the trainer. Or maybe you just waffle and slur some comments in ways that make them largely indecipherable.
Many companies take great pride in what they consider to be their open and honest work environments. But underneath management’s affirmations of these core values and beliefs--honesty and openness--often lies much withholding of sincere dialogue, innovative ideas, suggestions for process improvements, and valid criticisms of current process and policies. People ultimately disengage from the company meetings and supervisor dialogues for three primary reasons: (1) they know that their comments and suggestions will largely be ignored; (2) they realize that their ideas and contributions will be dismissed without explanation or exploration, because that’s what has always happened, or (3) they come to resent management’s “air” of indifference and condescension for anything that challenges the norm. Without the ability to make open and sincere contributions to the company’s body of knowledge and to influence how things are done, people will eventually withdraw from making such offerings. Once this happens, the company loses not only the immediate opportunities for individual and collective performance improvements, but it begins to stifle the development of its employees’ potential through their disengagement from improving the organization and any real long-term organizational learning.
In all honesty, ask yourself the following questions: How often does you manager solicit ideas and feedback from you and others about what's happening inside the organization? In what ways specifically do your supervisor and senior managers work to create a climate of openness, honesty, and trust with respect to the feedback they solicit? Do they then comment directly on the observations, criticisms and recommendations you make; give them due consideration and provide you with their perceptions and conclusions in return; or simply listen and then ignore everything you’ve said, with no explanation? What kinds of dialogues are held around your offerings? How are people rewarded and recognized for such contributions? How does your supervisor react when people’s recommendations or comments appear to contradict the mainstream thinking? Depending on your answer to these questions, your organization may be learning a lot or nothing at all.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Management Myths
Unleashing human potential at work and creating the freedom to contribute meaningfully
If you’ve ever gone to a bookstore to find a good book on business leadership or management, the number of titles purporting to unlock the secrets of successfully leading an organization will overwhelm you. Countless recipes for success line shelf after shelf of Borders and Barnes and Noble.
But the worlds described in those books are never where you and I live. We know this from the experiences of our workaday worlds. We live inside corporations where management seems to shower us with countless tribulations and inanities that prevent us from feeling a sense of purposefulness, value and contribution. And they do this in a myriad of ways, everyday, that annoy and perplex us. We see little connection between what we do and what lies upstream and downstream of us. We are given so little responsibility, entrusted with so few decisions, and assigned repetitive, tedious tasks. We seem to dwell in trivial matters, with too much to do, multiple shifting priorities, and little perspective on what matters most or how best to contribute. In fact, if you talk much to other employees, you might conclude that companies succeed in spite of their managements and only because of the heroic efforts of employees to overcome the impediments management streams their way.
What is this all about? Why does this happen? Is management so cloistered and shielded from their own workplace worlds that they can’t see what’s happening? Have they forgotten what it’s like to be a grunt trying to maneuver through a raft of management requests and imposed task priorities just to get their own work done? Or is management just so overwhelmingly preoccupied with their own self-importance and obtaining the next bonus that they focus almost exclusively on their own goals and objectives and pay little attention to how their own company works and the real problems that confound their employees?
We believe that the managements of most corporations simply labor under a set of myths that misinform them everyday, myths that are deeply embedded in their psyches and totally invisible to them. It’s like they’re living in a room where muzak has been playing for two years; after a while, they can’t hear the music playing anymore. These myths have become so deeply embedded into the fabric of the companies' cultures that they are virtually imperceptible.
Our hope for this blog is that if we can make these myths visible to management, they might actually be able to see the folly of some of their behaviors and the underlying beliefs and attitudes that catalyze those behaviors. By doing so, we believe we might be able to unlock the vast repository of human potential, desire and entrepreneurial spirit that lie trapped inside these monoliths of dysfunction and ineffectiveness. At the heart of all of this is our desire to unleash the human spirit and create the freedom to excel, contribute, and feel valuable inside places where people spend an abundance of their lives. If we can do that, we will feel successful.
Toward this end, we ask all of you attending this site to contribute your own insights into this subject of interest. We know that you have endless sources of information and insights by virtue of where you work everyday. We obviously will share our ideas and recommendations, but we are necessarily limited by our own experiences and knowledge. So, together, we may be able to influence and ultimately persuade our corporate leaders to adopt more informed, more rational, and more enlightened and effective approaches to management by letting them see how their current ways of thinking tremendously limit the potentials of their people and, therefore, their organizations. After all, it will only be through harnessing the brains, commitment, attention, and energy of employees that companies can hope to succeed and thrive into the 21st century. And since we’re all in this together, it’s in all of our interest to start to move these corporations toward more enlightened leadership so that our posterity will also have productive places to inhabit, work and thrive. So, let us begin.
- Bill
If you’ve ever gone to a bookstore to find a good book on business leadership or management, the number of titles purporting to unlock the secrets of successfully leading an organization will overwhelm you. Countless recipes for success line shelf after shelf of Borders and Barnes and Noble.
But the worlds described in those books are never where you and I live. We know this from the experiences of our workaday worlds. We live inside corporations where management seems to shower us with countless tribulations and inanities that prevent us from feeling a sense of purposefulness, value and contribution. And they do this in a myriad of ways, everyday, that annoy and perplex us. We see little connection between what we do and what lies upstream and downstream of us. We are given so little responsibility, entrusted with so few decisions, and assigned repetitive, tedious tasks. We seem to dwell in trivial matters, with too much to do, multiple shifting priorities, and little perspective on what matters most or how best to contribute. In fact, if you talk much to other employees, you might conclude that companies succeed in spite of their managements and only because of the heroic efforts of employees to overcome the impediments management streams their way.
What is this all about? Why does this happen? Is management so cloistered and shielded from their own workplace worlds that they can’t see what’s happening? Have they forgotten what it’s like to be a grunt trying to maneuver through a raft of management requests and imposed task priorities just to get their own work done? Or is management just so overwhelmingly preoccupied with their own self-importance and obtaining the next bonus that they focus almost exclusively on their own goals and objectives and pay little attention to how their own company works and the real problems that confound their employees?
We believe that the managements of most corporations simply labor under a set of myths that misinform them everyday, myths that are deeply embedded in their psyches and totally invisible to them. It’s like they’re living in a room where muzak has been playing for two years; after a while, they can’t hear the music playing anymore. These myths have become so deeply embedded into the fabric of the companies' cultures that they are virtually imperceptible.
Our hope for this blog is that if we can make these myths visible to management, they might actually be able to see the folly of some of their behaviors and the underlying beliefs and attitudes that catalyze those behaviors. By doing so, we believe we might be able to unlock the vast repository of human potential, desire and entrepreneurial spirit that lie trapped inside these monoliths of dysfunction and ineffectiveness. At the heart of all of this is our desire to unleash the human spirit and create the freedom to excel, contribute, and feel valuable inside places where people spend an abundance of their lives. If we can do that, we will feel successful.
Toward this end, we ask all of you attending this site to contribute your own insights into this subject of interest. We know that you have endless sources of information and insights by virtue of where you work everyday. We obviously will share our ideas and recommendations, but we are necessarily limited by our own experiences and knowledge. So, together, we may be able to influence and ultimately persuade our corporate leaders to adopt more informed, more rational, and more enlightened and effective approaches to management by letting them see how their current ways of thinking tremendously limit the potentials of their people and, therefore, their organizations. After all, it will only be through harnessing the brains, commitment, attention, and energy of employees that companies can hope to succeed and thrive into the 21st century. And since we’re all in this together, it’s in all of our interest to start to move these corporations toward more enlightened leadership so that our posterity will also have productive places to inhabit, work and thrive. So, let us begin.
- Bill
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