We see the idiocy of assuming that past performance is always a good predictor of the future all the time, but it seems especially true at senior levels.
First, there is the penchant for identifying ‘high potential’ starting in kindergarten and providing lots of extra training and coaching, while ignoring those who may be late bloomers or less obvious (read quieter).
Then there’s the Peter Principle, which is not only alive and well, but functioning even more efficiently today than it was when Laurence J. Peter first described it back in 1970.
We relish looking at the past to predict the future, thus choosing to ignore all extenuating circumstances and surrounding factors that played a role in the person’s performance.
We forget, or ignore, that
one manager’s star is another manager’s bomb;
the skills needed to take advantage of an economic expansion are very different from those needed in a downturn; and
turmoil or an ongoing crisis in a person’s personal life often impacts their performance at work.
Last, but not least, we need to get over our love affair with the idea of the hero-leader who, with a wave of the hand, can part the seas and eliminate obstacles.
It probably dates back to the cavemen, but it’s become more acceptable with the passage of time. Or maybe it’s just that the level of cheating needed to upset people and the stakes involved have increased so much.
Of course, the best thing to do if you’re going to cheat is don’t get caught, but if you do and lie about it the penalties increase exponentially.
For some reason people are tolerant of the cheating, in some cases they even seem to expect it, but they go totally ballistic when they get denial and lies from the cheaters when they are caught.
Nixon and the Watergate tapes are a case in point. Dirty tricks in politics were nothing new; it was his blatant lying and lack of remorse that resulted in his impeachment.
When Nixon was up there denying that he edited the tapes and claiming to know nothing about it one thought kept going through my mind and my conversations, “How stupid does he thing we (the American people) are?” and that reaction hasn’t changed with any of the hundreds (thousands?) of accusation/proof/denial scenarios that have played out since, whether in politics, business, religion, sports or any other arena.
It takes a great deal from our so-called leaders to get a reaction beyond a shrug of disgust from me, probably because I have no-to-low expectations.
But treating me as if I am stupid will send me around the bend in no time flat.
I have no liking for Bernie Madoff, but at least he had the guts to plead guilty as opposed to Jeff Skilling, who added the cost of his trials and appeals to the rest of his fraud believing that we were too stupid to see/understand what he did.
The saddest part is the example these clowns set for younger generations.
What really happens to those like Nixon, Ebbers, Skilling, and all the lesser cheats?
Some serve a few months or years in jail; they might lose their “good name,” although that will fade in time, but they won’t be left destitute. Most go back to their old life; if they can’t do that they can always write a book, become a guest speaker or go on the talk show circuit.
The same actions that brought them down will serve to lift them up, so what’s the big deal?
As to the sports arena, another athlete on steroids or some other performance-enhancing drug is barely news these days.
“The Canadian sprinter stunned the world by running 100 meters in 9.79 seconds. Oops. Busted. Turned out Ben Johnson was the world’s fastest steroid abuser.
“How many athletes are using performance-enhancing substances? The answer is, everyone who’s willing to.” says Jay Coakley, author of Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies.
“Every athlete looks for an edge,” says Charles Maher, Cleveland Indians team psychologist. “Some are conflicted about it. They want a competitive advantage but they don’t want to damage themselves.”
With no real consequences in the vast majority of cases, and whatever penalties there are quickly forgotten, why not cheat?
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder KG Charles-Harris.
Why did you start M3? I started the M3 Foundation when I became aware of the plight of black boys in school. In the San Francisco Bay Area, 73 percent of black boys drop out of school (nationally the average is 54%). These statistics places one of the wealthiest areas of the world on par with war torn areas like the Congo or very impoverished nations like Laos. The statistics, along with meeting some of these kids, shocked me into action.
Another issue was that I wanted my own children to receive a good public school education.
To ensure that this happened, it was necessary to put a structure in place that enabled teachers to do what they were supposed to, i.e. teach students who were performing at or above grade level.
Sadly, most teachers and schools are unable to do this because of the significant portion of students lagging several years behind grade level; that results in remedial teaching and a lower level of education for all.
How did you come up with the approach? The approach was based on common sense. We cannot expect people who are lagging behind to work less and still achieve the same results as those who have worked more in preceding years. Also, we have to make a fundamental decision. Are these boys unintelligent, or is it their environments that are affecting them negatively?
We put together a program which used sports and hip-hop as a carrot and focused on providing homework assistance, extensive mathematics tutoring and surrounded the boys with role models (UC Berkeley male students) as tutors and team leaders.
The program is intense; we work with the boys three times per week for 4 hours in the afternoon and 4-6 hours on Saturdays. One of the keys to the program is our excursions; it is difficult to have vision and dreams when one never has been exposed to something beyond the few blocks of inner-city where one resides.
What have been the most difficult roadblocks? We are encountering road blocks all the time. We are still a startup, though we have proven that black low-income boys can perform well. We now have an average GPA of above 3.0 across all the school sites where we are active.
The most difficult roadblock we encountered was being shut down by the school district because of a perception that we discriminate. We have created a model for the most difficult student population, African American boys from low-income backgrounds, and have proven it works. Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, it is difficult to serve this population since we are unable to select students based on race, gender or other characteristics.
Luckily, thanks to the assistance of one of our Board members, we were able to move beyond this with the school district and are now experiencing them as good partners.
Of course, we are always experiencing challenges of hiring strong team members, retaining and motivating students, working with parents, and many other issues.
Is M3’s approach scaleable? When I started M3, one of the goals was to create a scalable and cost-efficient model. Because these were some of the founding thoughts, we constructed the program around these objectives and are managing to have a cost per student that is significantly lower than other programs working with these types of students. In fact, we have lower costs and better results (in most cases).
We have managed to accomplish this by leveraging the resources we have through partnerships with other organizations and also measuring everything we are doing to ensure we get the results we desire. If we fail to achieve the results, we are able to evaluate our performance from an objective perspective.
This has been difficult to engender since most non-profit organizations are more “touchy-feely”; we want to ensure that we are both empathetic and results oriented.
A personal note from KG. I cannot have this opportunity to speak to all of you without appealing to your generosity.
Since more than 50% of US African American males fail to graduate high school, and 64% of those who drop out end up in the penal system, one of the strongest ways to lower crime is to ensure that these boys receive a good basic education.
The absolute proof is that less than 1% of college educated black males end up in prison while 64% of drop-outs end up there.
Please feel free, whether to fight crime, enhance education or because of racial pride, to donate to M3. Please visit our website; click to donate or send a check to M3 Foundation, 832 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94710
What’s going on? This post is a call for your thoughts.
I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.
18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.
More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.
Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.
On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.
I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.
And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.
“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.
The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”
Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.
You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?
How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?
What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?
I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!
An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.
Not long ago a friend was at a high school basketball game; the home team, from a wealthy community, was losing to the visiting inner city team. My friend was horrified to hear the home team students start chanting “We don’t care, we won’t fuss, someday you will work for us!”
He was even more aghast when he realized that many of the parents were joining in.
Empathy is especially important for those kids from wealthy areas whose parents often have (hopefully) unconscious, elitist MAP.
But it’s hard to empathize with things you’ve never experienced.
Neither adults nor kids can understand hunger if they’ve always been able to eat when they feel like it.
It’s not just feeling hungry, cold, wet, etc. that creates empathy; it’s enduring them beyond where it’s comfortable that allows people to get some idea of what millions face every day.
Few adults like venturing outside their comfort zone and kids like it even less, but learning empathy requires discomfort. Go ahead, you’ll survive—I promise.
Please take a few minutes to read the article and think about your own level of empathy and the levels of those around you—at home, at work and elsewhere.
Then think about what you can do to increase empathy in your little corner of the world. Perhaps then we can replace one e-word, entitlement with another, empathy.
If everybody does that the whole world really will change.
Perhaps ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ should be rewritten, ‘As you parent, so shall you hire.’
The generations that parented the Millennials are reaping the results of confusing self-esteem with entitlement.
The kids who sang ‘I am special / I am special / Look at me / Look at me… (set to the tune of Frère Jacques) in nursery school are still thinking that way in as they move through college and into the workforce.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, narcissism researcher and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable than Ever Before, thinks that parents should stop “meaningless, baseless praise,” which starts even before nursery school.
Instead of mindless compliments why not take the time to teach them that all actions have consequences (AKA cause and effect)—even doing nothing.
Praise what they accomplish and instill in them an appreciation of the real value found in the words, actions, deeds, and contributions, both large and small, that they make in the world.
If your kids are young start by not only eliminating empty praise from your home, but also teaching them how to recognize it and why they should discount it.
With older kids—teens, twenties, thirties—help them wrap their minds around the idea that life doesn’t offer entitlements to anyone and share with them the real facts of life.
They are special to
you, because you are their parent, and to others who also love them;
themselves because “self” is the only person they will ever truly know or actually have the ability to change.
They are not special to others, except as the result of their words, actions and deeds.
Being special to you and to themselves does not entitle them to special treatment from their teachers, friends, bosses, colleagues, the guy complaining about their loud cell phone conversation at Starbucks or the cop who tickets them for speeding.
Special isn’t related to self-esteem—self-esteem is grounded in and built from their own efforts and accomplishments.
Self-esteem entitles them to nothing, but provides the strength to not only survive, but thrive, now and in the future.
They may not appreciate your efforts now, but they will be forever grateful as they make their way though the world as adults.
If you are a manager and despair at the quality of people that fill your entry level positions, not their attitude, but their skills and basic education, prepare for it to get worse.
Perhaps instead of ranting and whining about America’s loss of global leadership we should look closer to home for the real cause—US education.
The ethnic groups with the worst outcomes in school are African-Americans and Hispanics. The achievement gaps between these groups and their white and Asian-American peers are already large in kindergarten and only grow as the school years pass. These are the youngsters least ready right now to travel the 21st-century road to a successful life.
By 2050, the percentage of whites in the work force is projected to fall from today’s 67 percent to 51.4 percent. The presence of blacks and Hispanics in the work force by midcentury is expected to be huge, with the growth especially sharp among Hispanics.
No, whites and Asians aren’t smarter, but they do have socioeconomic advantages that are lacking for these minorities.
Advantages that our educational system and politicians at all levels are doing little to address.
It’s not always about money, although that is a part of it, nor is it about standardized tests that do little to improve true education, it’s about innovation and educating outside the box.
Harvard Graduate School of Education is creating a new doctoral degree to be focused on leadership in education. It’s the first new degree offered by the school in 74 years. The three-year course will be tuition-free and conducted in collaboration with faculty members from the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The idea is to develop dynamic new leaders who will offer the creativity, intellectual rigor and professionalism that is needed to help transform public education in the U.S.
Creativity, intellectual rigor, professionalism; this leadership isn’t just about visions and influence, it’s about creating people who will roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty often toil in relative obscurity on the biggest problems facing this country.
Kathleen McCartney, the graduate school’s dean, explained one of the dilemmas that has hampered reform. “If you look at people who are running districts,” she said, “some come from traditional schools of education, and they understand the core business of education but perhaps are a little weak on the management side. And then you’ve got the M.B.A.-types who understand operations, let’s say, but not so much teaching and learning.”
Will it work?
Can the program make a difference quickly enough to change the current downward trajectory of our future?
Will other schools step up to the plate now or will they wait a decade or so and see how the Harvard program fares?
Does anybody care enough about what will happen in 20, 30, 40 years to accept a little discomfort now or should we just build more prisons?
Leadership Turn is ending; its last day is December 29. I’ve enjoyed writing it and our interaction since August 16, 2007 and I hope we can continue at my other blog where Leadership’s Future will carry on.
If you enjoy my views and writing, please join me at MAPping Company Success or subscribe via RSS or EMAIL.
Manhattan, home of Wall Street, financial sorcery, hyper-competitiveness—and tutoring for 3 and 4-year-olds.
This story is one of the saddest I’ve read lately.
That is an age when a child should spend time being a child, exploring their world, running around, creating imaginary worlds, friends, situations and enjoying unconditional love.
Instead, they are learning that to please mommy and daddy they have to get a certain teat result and get into a certain school.
…3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.
Granted, I didn’t read all 166 comments, but 98% of the ones I did read were negative on tutoring. Many of them reacted as I did—let kids be kids.
But many parents see their kids as a reflection or symbol of their own success; that means pressure to excel—even at that age.
Of course, those who do get in will be labeled “high potential” and “leadership material,” which is ridiculous at that age. And so we destroy potential in the rest.
Life is so short and childhood is even shorter. There is plenty of time to compete, set goals, worry whether you are achieving enough vs. what others are doing. Time to find out that love can be conditional on accomplishing your parent’s expectations.
What do you go to bed thinking about; what dominates your dreams; what do you ponder during the day?
Your aches and pains; the gray hair you found; the new outfit you bought, but aren’t sure is right?
Do you dwell on the words or email that may be a slight—or not?
The colleague you’re not sure likes you; the boss who seems OK, but…?
It’s more than a matter of the glass being half full or half empty.
Like the dog that worries a bone, constantly thinking and talking about anything focuses you on it; prioritizes it and makes it paramount until it dominates all other thoughts.
Focus works in both directions—it can launch you to the heights or toss you into a dungeon of doom—taking your family and friends with you.
Most importantly…
Focus is a choice.
Choose wisely.
I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving and a bountiful life.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Dan McCarthy had a terrific post on why choosing leaders is a gamble—be sure to read the comments.
Cheating isn’t new, 
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder 
18 years ago 
But it’s hard to empathize with things you’ve never experienced.
thinks that parents should stop “meaningless, baseless praise,” which starts even before nursery school.
Instead of mindless compliments why not take the time to teach them that all 
and in the future.
If you are a manager and despair at the quality of people that fill your entry level positions, not their attitude, but their skills and basic education, prepare for it to 
Manhattan, home of Wall Street, financial sorcery, hyper-competitiveness—and tutoring for 3 and 4-year-olds.
What do you talk about in your life?
