Category Archives: Management

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The Disingenuous Bop

Imagine working for a company where more than 80% of your customers held you in disregard. Congress has achieved that milestone of late, with an 82% disapproval rating. I want us to internalize that carefully, as the vast majority of us continue to share a sense of patriotism and love of our country, the very freedom and opportunity and dignity we believe to be our core shared values as Americans. We are patriots and we love our nation, but 82% of us hold our employees in Congress in disregard. Is it possible that we have found a way to separate the institution from its inhabitants, that we can continue to have pride in the ideal of democracy separate and distinct from its practice?

Seems like a reach to me. I am struggling with it as our nation reflects the wounds of the war of words being waged on our behalf in Washington, where our representatives are charged with an absolute mandate to serve the public good above all else. I am having a hard time believing an election cycle or two with the peaceful reassignment of power is likely to bring broad healing,

I have been writing a good deal of late about process, looking for corollaries of acceptable norms between business and government, digging into the core of behavior where bad form results in bad outcome. The entire tone of the debt ceiling debate felt wrong to me, and I wondered again if what we were hearing publicly was the same as what was being said privately. To that end, I wondered about the very nature of the language spoken in chambers and to the public, the rules of order imposed historically to remind us that with each gavel banging resolution we remain on the same team with a common purpose.

The imposed civility of government dialogue (“the gentleman from Nevada,” “my distinguished colleague from the great state of Virginia”) clearly was intended as a matter of protocol to smooth out the edges of vehement disagreement. I suppose that makes sense. Yet when one or the other party was asked as the hours ticked away about the claim that”we were getting close to a deal,” inevitably the retort would be: “I don’t know what they are talking about.” Some may call that negotiation style, readying for backroom agreements. To me it all seemed laden with secondary agendas that in the acceptance of dysfunction became unofficially primary—disingenuous at best, destructive at worst.

The problem for me with disingenuous discourse—posturing, grandstanding, two-faced commentary—is that it a symptom of a fundamentally unhealthy organization. Saying one thing to someone’s face and another behind his or her back may provide a temporarily effective tool in maintaining order, but it is fraught with peril in the critical endeavor of building consensus.

If we all lost the battle together, perhaps we can take from it a lesson for the business minded in moral application and at least get our heads screwed on straight as it applies to office behavior. We’ve all had occasion to dance The Disingenuous Bop. Let’s put a spotlight on the dance floor and see what reflects in the disco mirror ball. In the business world we sometimes call this gossip, and we know it is rotten to the core. It can go something like this, two employees in an ordinary private exchange, talking about their boss…

Jane: What do you think about Barry?

John: I really like Barry. I just don’t think he is very good as a leader.

Jane: Yeah, I like Barry, too. He was great when he hired me. But now he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.

John: Did you read what they wrote about Barry in the Wall Street Journal?

Jane: Yes, I wrote him an email and told him I thought they were unfairly harsh. He needed the boost.

John: Yeah, me too. I hope that helped him feel better. But you have to agree, he had it coming. He championed that stupid project and we lost a ton of money on it.

Jane: Yeah, I know, I thought it was going to be high-profile so I asked Barry to put me on it and he did. Then the project tanked. I tried to get off it, but I was stuck on it. Luckily I’m not taking the heat, he is.

John: Yeah, you dodged a major bullet on that. Lucky you. I was in the final milestone review last month and I knew it was a dog. It needed at least another month of polish.

Jane: Did you tell the group more time might save it?

John: No, it would have pissed them off. They were so happy with it, feeling self-satisfied and even though Barry asked if anyone thought we were in trouble on it, I knew that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, so I just went along with the program.

Jane: You probably would have taken some heat for being disruptive, so you kept your head low, that makes sense. I just wish the project would have been a winner, because I was going to ride it all the way up and ask Barry for a raise and a promotion.

John: And you would have earned it, too, if the project had been a winner. Barry would have been a happy camper, so you probably would have gotten it. Too bad.

Jane: Yeah, what a lost opportunity. Hey, are you going to the party at Barry’s house this weekend?

John: Absolutely, wouldn’t miss it. Career limiting move not to go to his party.

Jane: Yep, I’ll be there too, same reason. Good thing we both made the guest list. I guess he still likes us.

John: Yeah, I like him too. I don’t really like his parties though.

Jane: Agree 100%. Boring and not fun. See you there.

Harmless water cooler chat? A bonding experience with a fellow employee meant in good humor? Of course you would never engage in anything like this. It is rooted in the disingenuous, ugly in every respect. A person of honor would either reset the give and take or walk away.

There is nothing about being disingenuous that is ultimately productive. We see the embers all around us. Dance carefully, your name could be substituted for that of Barry at any time. If someone plays the game with you, they’ll play the game against you. Honor by definition is consistent. Smug is not a long-term strategy. Not caring about not caring is not sustainable. We are meant to live in one world, not maintain parallel existences for convenience and expedience. Style is content. Integrity only has one face.

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Deadlines, The Final Frontier

Looks like we dodged a bullet.  The United States of America will not default on its debt, We The People will be allowed to borrow more money to stay current in our obligations by way of a vague deal to curb deficit spending going forward that the House, Senate, and President will find a way to stomach late in the 11th hour.  Why don’t I feel proud?

In my mind, the process for resolution which was recently described by Senator McCain as “bizarro” has been a farce of such epic embarrassment, it is impossible to comprehend as somehow reflective of our shared values.  Last minute threats and posturing and leverage and mano a mano entrenchment ignore the obvious framework of achieving a shared vision — that working relationships must continue long after the dirty work is done.  Last week in a fairly heated discussion thread about the debt ceiling on another social networking site, an astute friend of mine wrote:

…the whole situation is disappointing. No one on the national scene has really acted that well.   Should we even give them praise for negotiating?  Has it come to that–we have to praise people for doing what sensible people do?

His exasperation is well-founded, and leads me to ask again, why must we accept one set of standards of conduct for business and a different set for government?  This is especially troubling since so many people in government have spent at least some of their career working in the private sector, where market forces determine the kinds of norms of acceptability and consequence our elected officials seem to ignore.

To be clear, I am not talking about mission structure — government service is not profit minded by design, so of course decision-making is not intended to be ROI focused, that would be absurd.  We go to war because our security is at stake, it is a cost.  We fix roads and build new infrastructure because they are the backbone of our shared needs, they are cost centers paid for by taxes, they are not profit centers so boardroom discussions will always be different.  I am talking about standards of conduct, behavioral norms — like honest discussion and earnest debate and timely resolution.

Consider that last one for a moment: timely resolution.  Anyone who has ever worked on a project knows the meaning of the term deadline.  Anyone who has ever taken a class knows that the date does not move for the final exam.  Anyone who has ever paid a bill knows that the due date is not negotiable, miss it and you pay a penalty out of your pocket and potentially suffer a credit score impact.  Anyone who owes a balance on their taxes knows that April 15 is not negotiable — it’s not magical, it’s just not negotiable, it is the law.  Although deadlines appear to be abstracts — fictitious creations of human imagination imposed as structure on others to compel action — deadlines are part of life.  They are real.  We learn as children to address them and as adults to manage them, or we suffer the consequences personally and professionally.

Deadlines teach us to manage two of the great success factors of businesses and careers: timeliness and urgency.  Timeliness means just that, occurring at a suitable or opportune time — being appropriately on time according to expectation and need.  Urgency is the competitive advantage of not being satisfied with timeliness, getting ahead of the curve so that winning is more possibly in reach by better applied and more efficient use of time to create distance ahead of the competition.

What can we learn from government with respect to timeliness and urgency? Does government consider these to be core values, even expectations of government’s viability?  Does government consider timeliness and urgency as Nice-to-Have or Must-Have?  We observe their philosophical commitment in their actions.  My sense is, there is not much here worth emulating.  If anything, government process is the antithesis to lessons a good business understands — and that includes leaving big blocks of time for rigorous review.

Our elected officials for whatever reason simply do not seem to take the notion of deadlines as seriously as the rest of us.  In some ways, a lack of respect for deadlines is the very notion of an entitlement culture — if you do what is expected, you get paid, and if you don’t do what is expected, you still get paid, right up until you get thrown out by the voters.  When you get thrown out by the voters, you get a pension.  Perhaps we are seeing the reason why deadlines don’t seem to matter in the halls of Washington.

Perhaps the reason our government has become so dysfunctional is because we have allowed it to be so.  In the working world, there are rules, and if you violate them, there are consequences.  In elected office there only seem to be two rules:

1) Don’t be party to a scandal that your opponents can manipulate to your demise.

2) Get elected, then reelected.

Pretty much everything else seems to be forgivable.  A missed deadline is a missed deadline.  Since there is no profit motive, there is no personally assessed penalty.  That’s just wrong.  It lacks humility.

Bosses are often accused of setting arbitrary deadlines.  What is the difference between an arbitrary and real deadline?  Not much, really.  If the boss sets a schedule and declares that milestones must be accomplished according to the schedule, there is usually nothing empirical or even mythical about the published dates — well, maybe the December holidays for retail, or similarly calendar driven events.  Most deadlines are made up, they are criticized and chastised and the stuff of Dilbert moments — but imagine a business enterprise without them.  Someone has to be Dilbert.  Someone has to create urgency.  Urgency combined with innovation are the stuff of success, creativity combined with timely delivery are the stuff of investment payoffs.

Most of us hate deadlines, but we all know they drive us to make hard decisions sooner, get past analysis paralysis, come together as teams and deliver.  Deadlines are the stuff of anger and stress and resentment — and the stuff of competition and collaboration and reward.  We hate them, but we embrace them, because we aren’t given a choice.  Arbitrary or organic, deadlines make us get stuff done to the best of our ability given the time allotted, and with some success, we then often get the chance to come back later and improve on our progress.  Deadlines are motivation and measurement, realities we learn to meet as challenges.  That’s why bosses set “arbitrary” deadlines — because timeliness is an expectation for compensation, and urgency is often a path from good to great.

I am not a big fan of rules just to have rules, but as a boss, I have to insist on a few or work does not get done and value is not created.  Deadlines are sometimes extended or forgiven for good reasons, but anyone who has worked in a high performance environment knows not to take forbearance for granted.  An occasional exception for truly improved work or some extenuating circumstance?  Of course, that’s possible.  The same rotten outcome I could have had yesterday a week from tomorrow?  Not a chance.

Just hitting a date with no breathing room and a lousy set of deliverables is not making a deadline, it is surrendering to mediocrity and living to play another day.  If that is allowable process, dysfunction has triumphed over reason.  It’s not urgency, and it’s not okay.  In business, you would likely get fired for it, or your business would go under.

Urgency is hard.  Urgency is a factor in competitive advantage.  Urgency matters.

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On Polarization

In my last post I suggested that a good product development process was not democratic, it was the product of clear leadership, shared vision, teamwork, and consensus building.  Given the unacceptable performance of our elected leaders currently chewing up news headlines, I wondered what application effective free enterprise might have on the product development process that is democracy.  What can we expect of democracy in the laws and policies it creates if we think of that enterprise as group of employees whom we fund?

Imagine working for a company where you were assigned to solve an extremely difficult, hugely complex, mission critical project, and the best your team could come up with was a status quo stalemate where almost any way you projected various outcomes of the stalemate, the company was doomed to failure.  Because of the stalemate, you were more concerned about whether you would have a job when all was said and done than whether you helped your company make any progress solving the problem.  Your supreme tactic would be to blame the other side of the stalemate for the stalemate, and hope that enough people believed your story rather than theirs so that you survived and they didn’t.

Then the proverbial *$&# hit the fan.

Would this somehow be a justifiable position?  Ethically, emotionally, or logically?  Would you feel good about yourself, that you had acted within the bounds of expectation for which you had been given authority?  Would you really think you were safe from the temporarily ducked wrath of those who put you in the job?

I don’t think so.

Ringing any bells?

It is essential that we always remember in a democracy the government works for the people.  That’s makes every taxpayer an employer, since we fund the operations of our elected officials and those they appoint.  Think of yourself as a traditional employer.  If your employees were acting in the way our government is acting — posturing and manipulating and behaving with a level of dysfunction that would never be acceptable in any corporation — would you continue to tolerate it?  I would not.  I would demand cooperation, collegiality, collaboration, and progress.  Most of all, I would insist on honesty over spin, humility before ego.  That is only right in exchange for the trust of authority, plus salary and benefits.

How do we lose sight of this?  Because we fear government?  Because we don’t understand government?  Because we have become cynical and weary listening to rhetoric in all the media channels it now flows, endless noise absent of substance that drives us to the refuge of silence?  Because we are overwhelmed by the process of government where change seems so elusive we find it less painful not to engage than to engage?

Hegelian dialectic encapsulates a framework where the evolution of ideas and events is resolved through history in a process of thesis meeting antithesis resulting in synthesis.  Any reasonable person can understand this even if he or she has never heard of Hegel, who may be attributed disproportionate credit for the model.  The concept is as much observation and interpretation as it is construct, opposing opinions are always present and result in outcomes, intended or not.  Nation A and Nation B do not have a shared belief set.  If they resolve their differences amicably, change occurs.  If they do not resolve their differences amicably, they go to war.  One point of view slams into another point of view, one largely prevails, and change also occurs — much of it unpredictable.  We can only hope that the change is for the better, we cannot ensure it.  Consider the consequences of knowing attempts to drive change for unsound motivation — we get what we get.

We know that change happens when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same.  If we accept the status quo of the current process, the pain will remain.  If we demand better, we will get it.  Self-serving entrenchment is not a strategy of public service, partnership is.  This requires more than a letter or two to our elected officials threatening the loss of your vote, it requires a consistent communication loop that makes our expectations of consensus building a mandate, a necessity rather than an abstract goal.

It is an honor and a privilege to serve in elected public office, not an entitlement and in democracy not a power grab.  It was never meant to be a career, it was meant to be an opportunity for those with some hard-won bits of knowledge, experience, and wisdom to give back to the community through a period of public service.  That is the beauty and brilliance of representative democracy, the leadership is expected to evolve and turn over specifically for the public good.  When we all forget that and allow the political landscape to exist as an ecosystem unto itself — an inorganic bureaucracy that feeds and fuels its own self-aggrandizing perpetuation — we abandon good business practice and invite shenanigans.

I don’t expect the government to make a profit, it is a service organization meant to be self funding for critical needs, thus the true practices of free enterprise cannot apply.  Yet the basic behaviors and expectations of executives and managers that any responsible and passionate business owner or employer would demand must apply, or dysfunction will continue, and the business owners will suffer the consequences.  If you have ever been part of an enterprise where management allowed dysfunction to take over, you know how quickly the tables can turn and the potential devastating outcome.  It can happen quickly, without enough warning, and without a path to correction.

We all learn in grade school that the framers created a series of checks and balances specifically to ensure that one set of ideas did not permanently crush another.  However they did not design our legislative product development process so that it would bring stagnation and impasse, anymore than a business would want checks and balances to impede innovation and growth.  Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill showed us just a generation ago that we can have our cake and eat it too, so there is a proven model in recent memory.  We need to embrace that now or we all lose.

Good managers do not leave the most important problems to the last second.

Good managers appreciate the differences in the points of view around them and strengthen their outcomes with a mix of ideas.

Good managers talk to each other, not with poorly staged sound bytes to third-party forums to relay messages to each other.

Good managers put the enterprise and those they serve first, their teams above self-interest, and only accept reward when those conditions are met.

This isn’t hard, it is standard operating procedure for anyone who has ever worked in an important company role under time sensitive and otherwise impossibly difficult circumstances.

Demand better as an employer.  We deserve it.  We’re footing the bill.  This we have in common, all of us.

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Bosses Can’t Know Everything Because No One Tells Them Anything

From Character Counts — March 21, 2011

“Seven Truths for Bosses” by Michael Josephson

Michael Josephson is a wonderful commentator who focuses on ethics through his Josephson Institute in Los Angeles.  He offers short radio blasts each day which you will see me quote from time to time.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but his heart is always in the right place, and with these snippets, he does a good job of bringing complex concepts down to one minute sermons.

Here he is talking as much to the managed as the manager, creating empathy for the manager’s dilemma while keeping the manager on point with some stark statements you might call clichés, but you can’t ignore their truth.  Without hitting all seven (which you should read in the link), here’s my takeaway:

* Good communication in the workplace is harder than you think it is; without it, there is no alignment.

* The boss rarely gets the whole truth, and that is everyone’s problem, not just the boss’s nightmare.

* You can teach job skills, but you can’t teach character.

* Hiring is everything; think Casting.

* Values have to be alive and well in the workplace; lead by example and remember, it’s a marathon, not a series of sprints.

Always remember, jobs are short, relationships are long… or not.  Trust and information exchange have to go both ways, or no one wins.

In April I will be covering a series of my own snippets, hard learned bits that I originally cobbled together for some aspiring high school entrepreneurs last year.