After the British loss at Yorktown, the government led by Lord North collapsed in a Parliamentary vote of no confidence. The sitting members of Parliament communicated to King George III that they no longer had faith in the Prime Minister to effectively set policy. In representative government, the mandate to lead comes, directly or indirectly, from the led. I’ve been thinking lately that it’s a pity we don’t see the application of no confidence motions in more places. If we learned anything from the unfortunate case of Lord North (and from Braveheart), it’s that men don’t follow titles. Sure, they’ll go along for a while – as long as things are going well or as long as they don’t have options. But the moment they lose confidence or when a better opportunity presents itself, their support for your mandate to lead will fade away like a mist. You’ll look around one day and find yourself alone with your bad decisions, resented for your presumption of unearned loyalty, and ultimately made as irrelevant as the rock the water in a stream simply flows around.
Tag Archives: leadership
Sail on…
As much as I say I’ve become disinterested in politics, I haven’t been able to resist the temptation to spend the night pouring over exit polling results, interviews, and now the results starting to flow in from the East Coast. With the TV running between Fox and CNN, the radio tuned into a local Memphis news channel, and the internet streaming commentary from Western Maryland I’m probably working my way into a serious overdose. Maybe it’s that last nagging hope that at its best, politics can elevate us and that I’ll hear something, anything, that gives me an indication of the country moving in the direction of discussion rather than argument. Maybe it’s wishful thinking that some of those local results from far away will be legitimately local to me in the near future. Or perhaps it’s that the results have a direct impact on one of my oldest and best friends. Regardless, it’s a old habit that’s hard to kill.
It doesn’t sound like there will be too many surprises tonight – the pendulum is swinging back to the right after it’s hard swing to the left in 2008. A first year poli sci student could have called that one. The real questions won’t be answered tonight, though. The next weeks and months will tell if any difference is going to be made, if new faces are able to come up with new ideas or are at least able to deal with one another. I’m a pessimist by nature, but in my heart of hearts I can’t quite bring myself to believe that the ship of state is too far gone to save.
Chains…
There’s a way things are supposed to work. I’m supposed to know what my people are working on. My boss is supposed to know what I’m working on. And so forth and so on until somewhere in the stratosphere one person knows more or less all of the major projects that are running. For the record, “major” projects don’t include informing the building every time someone makes an adjustment to a slide set or when they need to buy a hundred dollars of toner for the printer. The chain of command exists for a couple of reasons and one of those is to make sure information flows smoothly both upwards and downwards. I’m more than happy to report my progress and issues to my boss, who can then report it to his boss, and upwards ad infinitum. What I’m not going to to is generate a completely new class of report that skips several steps in this process. It duplicates effort and basically makes any semblance of structure pointless at best.
We’ve gotten so concerned and wrapped around ourselves doing things because we can, that no one at any level has called a pause to assess whether we should. What a Charlie Foxtrot. Scott Adams would be proud.
Being Sherman…
During the Civil War, one of the greatest partnerships in American military history was forged here along the muddy waters of the Mississippi. The senior partner would become commander of the Army of the Potomac and bring Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to its knees in a grinding war of attrition, while the junior partner marched his battle hardened western armies south to Atlanta and on to the sea, making the Old South howl.
From camp near Memphis on March 10, 1864 and just after Grant was called to Washington and promoted to command all Federal forces, his old friend Sherman sent a memo of congratulations that read, in part, “…You go into battle without hesitation… no doubts, no reserve; and I tell you that it was this that made us act with confidence. I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come – if alive.”
If you’re very lucky, you’ll find such a colleague and friend once in a career. If you’re even luckier, you get your chance at being Sherman.
Steam…
It’s easy to work up a rant when you’ve already got a full head of steam behind you. The real challenge is doing it when the boilers are cold. Right now, though, I’m not about the challenge. It’s feeling more like a stream of consciousness kind of evening. Actually, tonight is feeling more like a trickle than a stream. Well, that’s not exactly true, either. There’s plenty to say; plenty of things that need to be said in the clear. Not that I expect that would change anything other than adding fuel to the fire. I don’t have quite enough ego these days to think that I can make that much of a difference – That got smacked out of me last fall. Maybe the best thing now is to focus on getting my eight-and-out every day, make self-preservation and sanity-preservation a priority, and stop trying to draw fire. I’m not sure I even remember how to do that.
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time, there was a bakery. The bakery was owned by a rich and powerful man who only visited the shop a few days each month. In his absence the shop was run by an expert baker who had many employees working under him. These employees, sales clerks, delivery drivers, pastry chefs, dish washers, and far away regional sales managers were all specialized in their respective work areas and brought unique skill sets to their jobs. Though not everyone loved it, the bakery had kept its doors open and survived past the two year mark when many start-up businesses fold. It had a small, but loyal following and was working hard to make incremental improvements to how things were done.
One day, the owner called the baker and told him that the next day there would be a truck of meat arriving and that they would be running the butcher shop next door to the bakery from now on too. “But sir,” says the baker, “we don’t have the equipment or the skills to operate a butcher shop. Perhaps,” he adds, “we should hire a butcher to run this new shop.” But the owner, clearly knowing best, told the baker, “don’t worry, just go in there and hack away at things until you figure it out. It’s not that hard to cut meat and besides, we’re not really worried about quality.” Shaking is head, the baker opens the shop the next morning. His staff does their best, but none of them have been trained at meat cutting and what could have become fine steaks were chopped beyond redemption and because the entire staff was consumed with opening the butcher shop, none of the bread, or pies, or doughnuts, were baked that day. As the staff focused on learning the skills of a butcher, their skills as bakers, and clerks, and delivery drivers slowly deteriorated and by the time they were even marginal butchers, their bakery had lost its customers to competing businesses that focused on their “bread and butter.”
The moral of our story is that in a world of specialists, it’s important, even critical, to use people where there skills and training are maximized. Where new or different skills are needed, those skill sets need to be developed through training or brought in from the outside. When you ask bakers to be butchers, don’t be surprised when things don’t work out as well as you’d hoped.
It’s just policy…
Policy
–noun, plural -cies.
A definite course of action adopted for the sake of expediency, facility, etc.: We have a new company policy.
Most of my professional life, I’ve been a policy guy in some shape, form, or fashion whether it’s writing, interpreting, or ignoring said policies. As a policy guy, it’s part of my mission in life to point out the general foibles of those who set policy… Even (and perhaps especially) when those policies are promulgated by those with whom I share bonds of affinity, friendship, and respect. Though it’s sometimes harder to poke the people you like with a stick, that mostly just means that it’s really worth doing.
As a matter of policy, my employer has decided that supervisory personnel are not allowed to work at locations other than at their assigned duty location (i.e. from home, a telework center, etc). Notwithstanding the fact that somewhere north of 60% of all personnel work somewhere other than the “corporate headquarters” and most of us supervise people who are geographically dispersed, the general belief is that you can’t manage what you can’t see. I have philosophical differences with this position, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a policy per se.
The challenge comes when, for unforeseeable reasons, the message goes forth that all personnel, including supervisors, will telework until such time as they are directed to report to the office. Seems all well and good from the outside, but the malcontent in me has a compulsion to poke at it just a bit further. The message that was really sent here is that “we know you’re capable of doing your job from a remote location and that’s what you’re going to do when it’s convenient for us… But don’t ask to do it when it’s convenient for you.”
I don’t have any moral qualms with hypocrisy and I certainly don’t have issues with working from home. I’m better able to focus on writing and reading when I’m not interrupted by “walkups” or people yelling across the room a couple of times an hour… And as we all know from our previous reading, a productive Jeff tends to be a happy Jeff. Still, it would be nice to do it occasionally when it helped me meet some of my own requirements rather than being marks on a tally sheet showing how quickly we got everyone “back to work.”
I’m just sayin’.
Climate…
Note: Before you continue, please take a moment and review my “Disclaimer” page. Posts like this one are the reason the disclaimer has its own page.
Every organization, regardless of size, has a “climate.” Defined another way, climate is the general attitude that pervades the workplace. We’ve all worked for organizations that were working well at one point or another – where good things just seemed to happen. The opposite is also true: It’s the reverse-Midas effect… where everything you touch turns to shit. That’s a long way of saying that there are certain indicators of general organizational health… and that people are usually well-served by paying attention to those indicators.
Want to know how well your organization is really operating? Look to issues like the level of trust within the organization (i.e. can you rely on the guy sitting next to you to deliver in the clutch), how well the organization communicates vertically and horizontally, the level of job satisfaction of your personnel, and if you are able to retain good people once you have them. If you find you’re having problems in more than one of these areas, you guessed it… Your climate sucks.
If you want to actually put your house in order, the way to do that isn’t in simply pushing harder and expecting more… it’s in addressing the root cause of why these issues are cropping up in the first place. Sometimes it’s a structural problem that can be addressed with a shuffle of the org chart, other times it may be a manpower problem (and that doesn’t always mean needing more people). Sometimes it means finding the right people, losing the wrong ones, or some combination of the two. Other times it may mean giving your best performers the room they need to operate effectively. And as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes it means some people need to be reigned in more effectively. The solution can’t be to just ignore the issues or you’re going to break your people and break the organization.
I’ll not claim to be a great leader, as I tend to think most of what’s written about leadership is pure bunk. And while it will probably never be my strong point, I know enough about leadership and institutional dynamics to know when it isn’t being done right. All you have to do is watch how people act and listen to what they say when they think no one is listening. If you’re a leader, it will be eye opening… and if you’re a bad one, well, I guess it won’t make all that much difference anyway.
Decisions…
I’ve never understood why there is so much resistance by so many people to the simple act of making a decision. I’m not thinking about things like what movie to see or where to go for dinner. It’s the ones about what projects should get priority, which ones need more incubation time, or which simply need to go away. Get the best information you can, decide the best course of action, and move out. Don’t whine and complain about how hard it is. Grr.
When the shoe is on the other foot…
From time to time you’ve seen me rail against the incompetence of management, their unresponsiveness to questions, and their apparent lack of interest in much of what’s going on around them. Well, with 10 days into my stint as a supervisor, I’ve already found myself hopelessly overwhelmed with paperwork, dangerously close to missing key milestone dates, and utterly annoyed at the ability of a supervisor to actually direct any work. For the last ten days, I’ve managed to call meetings, beat my BlackBerry to near unconsciousness, and not personally do any actual work. It’s a vicious cycle really; the more I engage in a project, the less I am able to actually do with it… and lord, don’t even get me started on the information papers, memos, and policies I’m supposed to be reading and approving. But damn don’t I hate it now that the shoe is on the other foot.
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