Note 1: This excerpt presents some whats and whys, a bit of the theoretical foundation for leadership skills.
Note 2: The goal of leadership skills (explained in detail in chapter 2) is to turn the vast majority of employees into 5Star people. The 5 attributes of a 5Star person are: well-trained, industrious, strong and independent, successful and proud. Strong means willing to stand up and be counted. Independent means using their own value standards to determine how to do their work rather than following the standards of the workplace. Successful is something controlled by the boss and proud is how they automatically feel only if they have the first four attributes.
HOW
SHOULD WE MANAGE
PEOPLE ?
IS
THERE A CHOICE
?
Managing people would seem to be
just another discipline, just another area in which a body of knowledge,
including theory, has been accumulated.
This knowledge should form the basis for a set of discrete, definable
procedures which if followed should yield the desired results. But "should" never occurs on any
day of the week. If it had, there would
be no need to write this book.
If you want to become a mechanical
engineer and are willing to invest 4 years and $100,000, there are a host of
universities and colleges which will eagerly commit themselves to the
task. I would say your chances of
emerging with useful knowledge, assuming you graduate, are as high as 80 percent. After graduation, if I line up ten of you
and direct you to analyze a machine with a problem, at least 6 or 7 will agree
on the problem. If I make you all agree
on the problem and ask for the fix, I may even get six of you to agree on the
same fix.
The above can be done in many
disciplines like accounting and nuclear physics. Don't try it in management of
people. From what I have seen, the
chance of getting even two of ten bosses to agree on the problem or on the fix
is low.
The reason for this inability to
agree is that management styles vary considerably and we are encouraged to pick
one which suits ourself, our personality or whatever. But who would recommend that a boss’ personality or style be
taken down to a machine and used to determine what to do with that
machine. "Hey stupid, don't pull
that stunt. Just get yourself down
there and try like hell to determine the problem using these specific tests and
then determine the solutions based on this set of defined knowledge. It has nothing to do with you
personally." But somehow when it
comes to dealing with people, we want to superimpose our style and our
personality, our likes and dislikes on the process. You dislike Phillips head screwdrivers, but you like flat head
screwdrivers. I am certain that those
feelings will not help you when you try to turn a Phillips head screw with a
flat head screwdriver. The same is true
for managing people.
The people management arena is
strewn with hundreds of these EXCUSES, such as "I don't like to ---"
or "I can't bear to ---". We
have all heard them. The actions evaded
range from not being able to get up in front of a group to not wanting to
counsel an employee, from not wanting to terminate to not being able to provide
succor in a time of need. The Excuses
to justify these evasions range from personality to "I don't want to hurt
someone" to "the moon was blue last night". There are also many people who would like to
blame the sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, religious, consultants
and others for their own management errors.
Excuses will always be available to anyone who is looking for them,
especially to those who enjoy the permissiveness of the "doing your own
thing" vogue. But recognize that
all of these Excuses are INVALID and their use signals that the user (boss) is
not 5Star.
As with machines, Excuses will
always limit your success with people, if not cause outright failure. Listen to yourself using them (we all do)
and get as far away in the other direction as possible.
You must not decide what a person
should be given based on what you have to give, only on what that person needs. Throw away your Excuse Box (see chapter 2)
and your management style. Use your
common sense and the same logical, methodical approach required to solve
technical issues. That approach
will be developed in this book.
THE NATURAL LAW
Although a large number of
additional Whys will be presented in the following pages of this book, it is
appropriate at this juncture to disclose that the SCIENCE OF MANAGING PEOPLE IS
THE SCIENCE OF LEADERSHIP, pure and simple, no more, no less. Whether or not the CEO or boss wants to
admit it, the SHIP IS ITS CAPTAIN. This
is what actually happens and the boss (CEO or lower) has no control over this.
He/she can't stop it, modify it, wish or order it away. It is a natural LAW which operates
inexorably and without regard for the human beings involved. The process which results WAITS FOR NO
ONE. It just happens day in and day
out.
Therefore, no matter what the
actions are, the words, facial expressions, body language, verbal or written
orders or policies, habits, personality traits, inactions through silence, or
other boss behavior, these are FOLLOWED by most juniors simply because the
great majority of them are Followers.
The subordinates become what the boss projects. If the boss works hard, they tend to work
hard. If the boss has little knowledge
of certain things, they have little knowledge of them. If the boss encourages, they will be
encouraged. If the boss cannot bring
him/herself to do certain things, they will not either. Followers clearly discern the implied Value
Standards and set out to use them in their everyday routine. This sequence is a natural LAW, one which makes
the boss either the subordinates' biggest ally or their greatest enemy or something
somewhere in between.
The boss by virtue of appointment
becomes the LEADER, whether great and fearless or tyrannical and unsupportive
or whatever. It is the boss who decides
how subordinates will act by Choosing his/her own actions. The boss can, of course, decide NOT TO
DECIDE, the "what they see is what they get" or the "I was the
one promoted so I must be OK the way I am" approach. The first quote represents a "to hell
with the subordinates" tack, while the second is the height of arrogance. I don't mean to seem judgmental about this,
but my true desire is to make crystal clear that each boss Chooses what their
subordinates will be led to be, consciously or unconsciously. That they will Follow the boss' lead has
been preordained!!!
So! Do we really have a Choice on
how we manage people? Do we get to
Choose a management style of our own?
The answer is, the LAW dictates that we have no Choice. We can only Choose how we make use of the
LAW and this is a Choice of the Value Standards toward which we lead.
LEADERSHIP ???
If we walk into a race track and the
horses are in the middle of the race, I am certain we will all be able to agree
on which horse is in the lead. It will
always be the horse "in front" of the other horses, the
"leader". The other horses are "following" the
"leader". So leading implies
being in a position Followers will try to attain. Two questions emerge.
1.
In what does the boss (CEO or supervisor) lead?
2.
What do subordinates look to Follow in a workplace?
Fortunately for us, these two
questions are merely different sides of the same coin. The name of the coin is
"Values". From the boss' view
it is his/her leadership, while from the subordinates view it is what they
Follow. It makes no difference which we
analyze.
FOLLOWING OR LEADING
To start the discussion, recall that
ninety percent or more of all subordinates are Followers, people looking to
produce their behavior through copying that of others. This copying process is applied to Values as
well as to actions. In the workplace,
people want to find out as quickly as possible what is expected of them so they
can meet those Standards and thus keep down the hassle, avert possible censure
and keep the paychecks coming to feed themselves and their families. Conforming to peer pressure is also a part
of this process. None of these are
surprising revelations.
Remaining with the subordinates, how
do they find out what's expected of them, what the Standards are for the
different Values? The process is the
same one used during childhood, the one which absorbs everything around
them. After soaking up everything which
is available, the brain's computer is used to sort out the "Do as I Say
Not as I Do" events, consequences presented by management or peers, and
other nuances.
Through this process, new employees
can very quickly get to act like all the other employees. They check what is happening to others and
what is happening on-the-job in terms of normal Values: attitude, cleanliness,
industriousness, honesty, integrity, admission of error, knowledge,
perseverance, fairness and all of the other ones. Their brain automatically performs computations and suddenly they
know what the Standards are for each.
They have, in effect, translated actual conditions into Value
Standards.
So equipped, they begin to use these
Standards to perform their work, STANDARDS for precisely the same VALUES all of
us have. This is the Natural LAW. Recall that the Followers do not use
their own Value Standards to produce behavior in the workplace. Only 5Star people do that!!!!
So, employees detect the workplace
Value Standards and use them to decide how to carry out their work. If these Standards are high, we fly with the
eagles, beat the competition most of the time and love our workplace. If these Standards are low or toward Bad
Values, we walk with the turkeys, lose to the competition and generally dislike
coming to work. Can the boss afford to
leave this situation to the whims of chance?
Can the boss take a chance on which Good or Bad Values and their
Standards are utilized in the conduct of work?
The
leader's only recourse is to commit to frequently and clearly communicating
only very high Value Standards through the normal management actions
of supporting, directing and developing.
Actions speak far louder than words and the real truth is no one
listens to words!! As children we
didn’t understand the language of words and could only learn through the
language of action, through what people do and their tone of voice and body
language. This develops into a habit
and is carried into adult life. Communicating Values is thus an action
oriented process in which each boss must be proficient.
The boss’ actions range from
one-on-one discussions to group meetings, from providing tools to training and
benefits, from discipline to promotions and rewards, and from action or
inaction when it's their day in the barrel to termination for cause. Both actions and inactions transmit Value
Standards, the latter often being the loudest.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, these actions and inactions must
repeatedly reflect 8-10 Standards for all Good Values if we expect to have
EXCELLENCE in the workplace.
Carefully note the wide range of
actions from which Followers extract Value Standards to use in performing their
work. For high level bosses, what they
personally say and do may constitute a very small part of a subordinate's
sources. The leadership Value messages
received by a person consists not only of the personal actions of their
immediate boss, but also of what other people do to this person. "Others" includes staff, other
bosses, peers and the rumor mill. Over
the past week, a person may have received 200 messages on fairness, 100 on
quality, 50 on industriousness and only 2 on humility, very few of which came
directly from the immediate boss. The
person computes a new Standard for fairness using past data combined with the
latest 200 messages and repeats this for each Value. If these Standards are low or reflect Bad Values, the bosses are
in real trouble.
End of Excerpt