The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

In the Struggle for "Opinion" Supremacy, Who Wins?

In this goofy pop-psychology-dominated culture we live in, we are all entitled to our “opinion” about … whatever. So it comes down to one of two things: one, there are more of “you” than there are of “us,” so you win. Or, whichever opinions happen to be in fashion will win. No matter that we may both lose as a result.

This is nowhere more evident than in the opinions that carry some books to the best-seller list, and doom others to the remainder barrel.

For example: in his endorsement of Steve Chandler’s The Hands-Off Manager, the author of a NY Times “best-seller,” John Hoover, refers to Chandler’s book as a “liberating read.” What he means by this is that reading this book will give you the backbone to “act in your own best interests and the best interests of everyone working within your sphere of influence.”

I will admit to being a bit opinionated on this matter. But I my own conviction is that everyone working in an organization gets a paycheck from the organization. They are not self-employed. The title of Hoover’s book, by the way, is How to Work for an Idiot. Let’s assume it is not the boss’s conviction that she is an “idiot.” So what happens when the person who is working for that “idiot” herself becomes the boss? Now she is stuck with all of those “idiots” who are not working for her, or the organization, but for their “own best interests.”

We have made dysfunctional into a way of life.

Reader, Beware!

Not a new caution, for sure. But the gimmickry changes with the fashions. Recently [and reaching epidemic proportions] writers on subjects such as leadership and organizational excellence have been playing a special trick on us readers. They identify some less-used exemplars of (usually) temporary business success, and write a book explaining that those successful companies are successful because they used the writers’ proprietary recipes for how to do it. Since no one could know for sure whether they did or not, it seems a safe enough explanation. The trick gets somewhat exposed when different writers use the same companies, but different theories.

Or when the writers change their theories and disavow any responsibility for the failure of those once-successful companies. Most of this is by innuendo or implication, of course.

To try to gain visibility or status in the guru pecking order by doing this seems a bit sleazy to me. Since most successful corporate leaders can’t really tell you how it was they became successful, it suggests at least overwrought opportunism to me. I was knew a professor who wrote about business “ethics” who get dismissed for being “unethical.” Duplicity abounds in this market.

Any book that does not attribute a good measure of any executive’s success to luck is misleading.

Any comment?

Trickery Thrives

I must have been around five years of age when I discovered that people lied to each other, when they saw a personal benefit in doing so. A year later I discovered that “the truth” about most things is made up (unless you are dealing directly with Mother Nature – and I grew up on a small SE Kansas farm, so was burdened by this very naïve view of people’s attempted seductions of each other).

It seems to me, looking back over seven decades, that the fastest growing thing in America is not the economy nor the political tomfoolery but everyday commercial deceit. So I wonder if anyone else is troubled by these conditions:

1. That “experts” seem not to draw from the same reality, but end up with different and usually proprietary explanations of things. You might imagine that an “expert” was a person who had earned the right to speak the truth about this or that. But we are faced with 15,000 books, and therefore 14,999 different recipes about management and leadership, for example. Celebrities might be assumed to know less about most subjects than would the scholars in those areas. Not so. They know more, making it up if they have to.

2. Then I’m puzzled by the fact that leadership gurus work backwards – that is, they find certain temporarily successful companies not claimed by other such gurus, and attribute the success of those organizations to the theory they are espousing this year.

I’m stuck with the belief that anyone can “explain” anything after the fact. All that’s needed is someone to buy your explanation. I recall being about 3 ½ years old when I learned that. My mother and my father might buy different explanations about my alleged wrongdoing – but never the same one. So I know the game. As long as you don’t begin to wonder if GE would have been better off with a CEO  different from Jack Welch, you might buy the 43 explanations of GE’s success, or the one.

I think it might have been W. C. Fields who quipped something like, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Given that advertisements claim that every brand of aspirin is better than every other brand, one is left in a quandary: How can that be??

Any thoughts, fellow-travelers?

The Conditions of Learning: Life on the Farm

When I was but a tad, growing up on my grandparents’ small farm in southeast Kansas, I learned some lessons which have served me well over a long life.

So I got to thinking: where are our young people today going to learn those lessons? Not in school, unlikely at home, not from peers, not from the media or the popular electronic games (although they could learn some things there that I couldn’t have learned). Then I thought – is this just nostalgia for the “good old days.” I don’t think so. For one reason, they weren’t all that good.

But here’s an example of what I mean: Because I was clearly the youngest of the three of us, I had daily chores, usually beginning around 4 or 5 am. One was to draw water out of the well by bucket and put in a trough for the horses, which I had to harness and bring to the trough. I had seen my grandfather (a wiry old Irishman) do it. One flowing motion from dropping the bucket to emptying its contents.

I tried. I could fill the bucket in the well, but I wasn’t strong enough to bring it up. There wasn’t anyone I could ask to do it for me. They were busy with their own chores. So, I knew I had to accomplish the larger task of watering the horses, and that I wasn’t going to grow that much in the next 15 minutes. What to do? I tried filling the bucket half-full. Wow! I could haul that half-full bucket up and empty it. But wait a minute. That meant I had to make twice as many trips into the well with the bucket.

So be it. When it is necessary for you to accomplish something, you had to figure out a way. That’s the way my grandparents lived, always on the edge and up against their own wits. We lived in the real world.

That was the lesson. Most people I meet in present-day organizations haven’t really learned that – including their CEOs. An invaluable lesson. And free.

What we call “learning” today has little or no necessity in it – and it is often not about the real world. What does that predict to?

"Leaders" and "Followers"

There are no leaders without followers. And vice versa – there are no followers without leaders. As the old song had it, “You can’t have one without the other.”

About “leaders” - we often try to pretend that there are such people – or such functions – independently. Not possible. Media-made celebrities are “leaders” because they have devoted followers. People who get a lot of press usually have a lot of followers. Are they “leaders”? Is the president a “leader” because lots of folk voted for him (or her)?

If you follow some precept that you read somewhere but can’t attach a name to it, aren’t you still being led, even though anonymously? If you have a great need to be liked by others, who’s leading and who’s following? If you like someone and give them the benefit of the doubt, who’s leading (or following) whom? If you are a rabid fan of some rock star, are you the leader or the follower?

It seems obvious that you can’t have the one without the other. If you are in a position to shut off a  subordinate’s paycheck, does that make you a leader – or the other person a follower? If you follow someone’s lead out of fear – or ignorance - does that make a leader out of the other person, a bone fide follower out of you?

We’re not very good at thinking about interdependence in our culture. We’re more of a something-caused-something-else kind of culture. We have nouns and then we have verbs, so we are susceptible to thinking that the leader causes what followers do. If you consider that critically, you can see that it doesn’t quite work that way. I might be able to kill you, but there is no way I can force you to like me – or to follow my lead. Children understand that very well before they are forced into a somebody – caused – somebody else to do this or that view of the world.

The leader-follower relationship is a very complex one. To attribute the magic solely to a “leader” misses the point. If the leader needs a follower in order to be a leader, and if the follower needs a leader in order to be a follower, their interdependence can’t be “deconstructed.” The success of either depends upon the relationship. Ask any married couple. Ask any teacher. Ask any loser. Ask the person who provides her own leadership, and who follows her own leadership. The magic is in the compounding, not in the one or the other.

Are you following me here? Or, should you be?

The Me or Us Syndrome: Part III

There was a time when employees were thought of as "hired hands." Henry Ford complained that his workers screwed things up when they gave thought to what they were doing. He wanted to hire their hands, not their heads. He was reasonably successful as an industrialist. The idea that the people who did the work of the organization could have any input of value to running the place would have been considered preposterous.

Now, pendulum-like, we have moved significantly in the opposite direction. From a cultural posture of radical  egalitarianism, the hyped panacea of this season's fashions may be best captured in the title of Jon Spector's book, We Are Smarter Than Me. It's possible that this is true for the many "me's" who are not very smart. But anti-elitists we are as well, so you get in trouble these days by even assuming that some people are smarter than others (which threatens the reigning ideology that no one is dumber than anyone else).

It is certainly possible that a market segment could tell you what they want better than you could figure it out from the 19th floor. If they knew. But they don't. Customers in large numbers are remarkably fickle. So we're stirring a pot of assumptions, and merely declaring the outcome.

Not to pick on Jon Spector. He's got a good job. But if he really believed that everyone else collectively is smarter than he is by himself, why is he writing a book to tell us this? Is he suggesting (he isn't) that the people who attended the ecologically-expensive concerts on the climate recently know better what to do about it than the celebs they paid to come see and adore? If Spector's readers are collectively smarter than he is, why do they need him?

That fashionable idea may be carried by those who believe it, but it didn't originate there. Try as we will, there is no way to make the "right" decisions about the future -- if by that we mean the decisions that are in our own best self-interests. There are lots of people who are smarter than I am -- on this I am in full areement with Spector. But that doesn't mean I want them deciding how I should live my life. Or how I should run my organization.

There is no freedom without failure. And no insurance policy, in the form of spreading the responsibility or being in fashion, is going to change that.

The Me or Us Syndrome - Part II

Continuing on... from where we left off last time.

We're talking here about the "Me" vs. "Us" issue in organizations, as you remember. It is probably not so much of a problem in mediocre organizations. But it stands as a major impediment to making a high-performance organization (and I have no interest in helping people make or sustain a mediocre organization).  

And this may seem like I'm venting. But I'm not. After being directly engaged in these efforts for forty-five years, I must be tapping a bit of reality. A metaphor that often comes to mind when I'm doing a seminar or working with one of my client CEOs is that more and more people seem to see the organization in which they have "a job" as a sort of adult day-care center. They want the people in charge to make them "happy," and to provide for their emotional needs.

So managers (by any name) have had to increase their repertoire to include being therapist and "mother" to employees. This is unreasonably demanding for those who are barely competent in their own managerial role. They become the day-care supervisor when they may need the comforts of an adult day-care center themselves. Two marginally-competent people in any kind of communication with one another will not make one fully-competent person.

It's certainly okay to be -- what's the popular term -- "empathic" comes to mind.

But that's not what the customer wants. The customer wants performance. The further the people in the organization are from the real world, the more pop psych acting out they seem to be permitted. So the organization ends up with two customers--the ones who pay the bills and the ones who are only concerned about their paychecks. This makes the organization appear to the outside customer as being half-assed.

And the customer -- who is not always so -- is right. They may get less attention than do the adolescents in the organization.

Is it worth taking one more run at this issue...later? What do you think the critical question is?

Watch this space...Part III of The Me or Us Syndrome will appear on July 23rd.

"Me or Us," a Series of Three Thought Probes

This is a perennial issue that almost always arises in the work I do - the "me" or "us" question.

We have raised our children in this culture for years to be the center of the universe. By and large, they have no responsibilities for the family -- just rights. So, it is little wonder that when they grow up and get "a job" in an organization, they assume it is mostly about them and precious little about the organization.

As in assuming it is the organization's problem to make ME "happy." So, there is usually an underlying conflict between "me" and "us."

As a practical matter (which is where I like to be), it is not a matter of one vs. the other. It's both. It's just that we never learned how to see it both ways. It's always interesting to see how other people deal with this problem. In my approach, we consider several intertwined issues:

1. One is that, know it or not, people in an organization are ultimately interdependent, both vertically and horizontally. We're born dependent (unlike other species, we are born into dependence for a uniquely long period of time).
2. Then we are encouraged to be more and more independent -- an adolescent thing.
3. What we are not taught -- or don't learn -- is how to be interdependent, which used to be the measure of having "grown up." Now, we arrange the world so we can be adolescents all of our lives, usually having been born to parents who themselves are long-term adolescents.

The pop culture says that this is the way things are -- so deal with it.

I take a different perspective. It certainly does the individual no favor to let him or her continue on with the frustrations of acting out his or her adolescence. A high-performance organization requires grown-ups. It is absolutely about the individual, in the sense of being more competent today than yesterday. But, it is also about the organization. What you don't contribute, you have no right to claim.

So, this gets into matters of compensation and reward, of hiring and indoctrinating people (ala SouthWest Airlines), and of creating systems that feed the best interests of the organization while feeding the best interests of the individual.

To be continued...on the next two Mondays...stay tuned...

First, Thinking...

You would have thought everyone knew that thinking comes first (for those who are capable).

The first half or more of my book Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing is devoted to establishing how leaders think as the foundation for who they are, and thus what they do. In a recent Harvard Business Review feature entitled "How Successful Leaders Think," Roger Martin, who is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, tells us how.

Martin focuses primarily on "integrative thinking," his term for considering two alternatives and thereby generating a third. He admits that most leaders don't know they are doing this. But he knows.

Reminds me of the "third-person fallacy": the two people who are entangled with each other don't know why their thinking got them into the mess they're in. But an (academically-trained) observer can figure this out.

I've dealt with more than 10 times that many CEOs. And, I agree, they are always wrong about why they were successful, or not (as in How Executives Fail, my other book, shows, with an ironic twist).

Theories don't spring from the heads of practitioners, but from the heads of analysts -- like academics and journalists (one of whom told Jack Stack that his success was due to "open-book management") This furthered the journalist's purposes in having a proprietary term to ride. But that was not why Jack Stack was successful at SRC. Still, it's all well-intentioned.

Readers might have fun with his forthcoming book, The Opposable Mind, even though Dean Martin appears to be serious.

Choices

In a recent feature for GovLeaders.org, Ray Blunt identifies what for him are the three most important choices a leader confronts in her role. Our readers will recognize these as applying not just to leaders, but to anyone who has ever wondered, "What bears upon my purpose?" Fundamental in the history of philosophy.

The three choices are these:

1. What is my purpose? It's not possible to fulfill one if you don't have one. What vindicates my existence--the existence of my organization? What am I FOR? What is it FOR?

2. How should I deploy my mind and my energies? A "time" issue to some. I like to think of this as ROA (Return on Attention). We become what we pay attention to. Attention is an investment on which we (should) expect a reasonable return.

3. Legacy. We may wish for or even strive for a certain legacy. But the judgment of history will determine what it will be. So is it a PR job? Is it a matter of being born at the right time? Hitler looms large in history. Is it merely legacy? Or is it a legacy that keeps on giving for generations?

What is provocative here is that each of these choices determine the other two. Maybe they are three aspects of the same choice--who to BE, for the continuing benefit of whom? In the end, none of these choices is totally subject to our control.

So is it the choice or the consequences that matter most?