thinking/critical

People avoid leadership responsibility for many different reasons. Perhaps the most powerful reason is that true leadership involves the most humbling personal sacrifice.

I invite you to ponder two thoughts over the weekend. I’d like you to think about the effects of fear, and the benefits of action.

On any given Sunday evening a significant percentage of the workforce is dreading the end of the weekend. If you’re one of them, and if your reason for dreading work is that someone – or some thing – is keeping you from being effective, you may want to listen to this.

The relationships we have at work are significant. Like our families of birth, we generally have little control over who the members of the family are. Our work relationships have the power to bring us joy or cause us anguish. They can lead to the greatest creative breakthroughs or significant physical and mental breakdowns. Or they may be nowhere near those highs or lows, just droning on in the background of our work life, not driving us crazy but not making our lives any richer either. The bottom line for business is that an organization filled with happy humans is more likely to be profitable than a similar business filled with the unhappy sort. In his book The Relationship Cure, Gottman says “A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch – any single expression that says “I want to feel connected to you.” A response to a bid is just that – a positive or negative answer to somebody’s request for emotional connection.” According to Gottman, there are three types of response to bids: turning toward responses, turning away responses, and turning against responses. One example from the book (pp 36-37) works as follows:

Good decision-making is often defined as finding the opportunities that are the closest match to the characteristics and end results we desire. This approach consumes a lot of time. What if you started with elimination steps first? Could you speed up your decision-making and improve the quality of your overall effort?

Isolation from feedback is one of the most difficult aspects of being an independent business owner/operator or senior executive. In the case of the independent, feedback is difficult to find because of secluded working conditions. In the case of the senior executive, feedback is difficult to come by because colleagues will not offer it, and when they do it’s hard to tell if they are acting in your best interests or for a personal political objective.

An artist friend of mine once made a comment that an artist can not afford to be a dilettante – they must pick one medium and focus entirely on it to become truly skilled. To achieve mastery in an art requires years of curiosity pursued with discipline followed by more curiosity pursued with more discipline. If an artist flits from one artistic medium to another they never develop the skill in any one required to be a master. Could someone pursue a medium to the point of mastery, then pursue another medium?

The paradox is that the truly curious rarely get burnt out on work (though they may get burnt out on a particular job or manager). The incurious complain of morale issues, suffer from lack of recognition, and most horrifying of all, allow themselves to become bored.

Business income/operating statements reflect the reality of a business, right? But which reality? Depending on how you capitalize, amortize, categorize, and agonize, the same business could have many different income statements – without anyone doing anything wrong. There’s nothing wrong with this. But when one uses income and operating statements to manipulate, to support personal opinions that may or may not be based on fact or good knowledge, one can damage a business.

Choosing not to consider others ultimately results in not being considered ourselves, which is fitting. And if the failures of massive institutions such as Arthur Anderson and Enron, if the billions of dollars of losses of Merrill Lynch and other Wall Street firms don’t teach us that karma happens, then what will?