The “Human Nature” Justification Myth

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.

The Myths of Change

There are two myths of change. One is that change, if done right, should be easy. The other is that organizational change can occur when the individuals within it don't.

Change is hard. Anyone who has tried to change a bad habit can attest to this. If you are going to change anything significant you have to make it a priority and be prepared to struggle with it for some time.

Organizations emerge out of the interactions of individuals. Unless those individuals change their way of being, their relationships, their paradigms, their perspectives and their actions, the organization will not change. A change effort is always intensely personal. The change efforts doomed to fail are those that tell management that the change is directed towards the employee or tell the employee that the change is directed towards management.

The Myth of Potential

One of the popular myths, embraced even more widely outside of management circles than within them, is the myth of potential. More precisely, the myth that anyone has the potential to succeed, or to do well, in any environment. It is a matter of will that makes the difference.

Yet one doesn't have to point to the extreme example of Wilt Chamberlin succeeding as an NBA center or Willie Shoemaker succeeding as a jockey to point out that potential is very personal and far from unlimited.

Two things may very well be true of most of us. One, we do not realize our own potential. Two, we have no idea how much work it will take to realize that potential.

People are not infinitely capable or malleable. The smart manager realizes how different are the potentials of his team members and adjusts strategy to accommodate that reality.

The Myth of Power

Russell Ackoff makes a distinction between power over and power to. If you have power over someone, you have power to limit their behavior. "You have to be home by midnight." "You are not authorized to make purchases of more than $500." By contrast, power to enables. If you give someone the power to, say, repair refrigerators or set broken bones, you have given them power to.

“Power to” is elusive and difficult. Also, it often doesn't even look like what is traditionally thought of as power, so reliant is it on the education and empowerment of the subject. By contrast, power over looks like the cliché that animates the actions of so many; it clearly has a powerful person and one subject to that power.

If you are in a leadership position, take a different kind of inventory. Assess to what extent your people have new capabilities, have new sets of "power to," in the last 12 months. It is this increase in power, this increase in ability to create value that ultimately defines progress. Don't succumb to the allure of the myth of power taken out of children's literature about kings and queens.

The Myth of Communication

When surveyed, employees often indicate that they want more communication. The response to this is often short-lived, involving a flurry of newsletters, executive addresses, and an increase in email traffic, yet it inevitably misses the point. This is because the very notion of communication is misunderstood.

A default concept of communication seems to depend on a picture of information as a substance that moves from one person to another, like water poured from a pitcher into a glass. (Which suddenly makes those teacher admonitions to "sit still!" so much more comprehensible.) But communication doesn't work like that.

Instead, communication is a process of remote control, pushing buttons from afar, and hoping that you get it right. When I say "freedom" to you, I actually push your "freedom" word button. For one person that sounds like tiresome 4th of July speeches, to another it means complete lack of accountability, and to a third it conjures an invigorating concept. Depending on what interpretation the word freedom launches in your brain, what I say has very different meanings.

To compound this problem of communication, almost invariably organizations are made up of a variety of functions. Each function - accounting, legal, engineering, advertising, production - has a different worldview and is inclined to interpret any communication differently from the other. Hence, a large stream of communication that flows through any organization inevitably shows up as chatter, as static, rather than a meaningful signal or message.

When employees say that they need more communication, they aren't asking for more static. They are asking to be heard. Until you hear their story, understand their frustrations, goals, and experiences, you don't even know how to talk to them. Worse, as long as a person goes unheard, he or she gradually grows disengaged from your enterprise.

It is no myth that your organization needs more communication. It is a myth that such communication should begin with even more management pronouncements.

Why is Management Addicted to Myth?

One intention of this blog is to categorize various myths that we've seen. But I would like to explore why management seems to be addicted to myth in lieu of testable hypotheses or a coherent theory.

One reason may be the enormous pressure to be a part of the club. From outside of an organization it is easy to underestimate the enormous pressure to be a part of the management in-group. This group is defined by a particular worldview and if you don't share that worldview, you aren't really a part of the group. And if you aren't really a part of the in-group, you are part of the out-group. The consequences of such exclusion are real: those in the in-group can easily afford private school for their children, the latest luxury cars, and a second home in the mountains. If the boss makes comments like, "You need to really ride them to make sure they get that done," then you aren't about to make nerdish comments like, "have we ever tested the null hypothesis of that claim?" To suggest that the business be run as an experiment is to suggest your way out of the conference room and into the coffee break room with the other commoners. If you want to be a part of the tribe, you accept the tribal myths.

http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/nardelli-at-home-depot-hd-one-third-of.html

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