Anyone who knows me knows that hypocrisy and fanaticism are tied for first place on my list of things-that-I-detest.
Political, religious and business hypocrisy continue to make headlines; rarely do I find myself laughing, but this time I did.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the undisputed king of monopolistic uncompetitive practices is boo-hooing to both US and European regulators that Google has an unfair advantage in search.
Ballmer said Microsoft believes Google Inc. has done a number of things to gain an unfair advantage in the Internet’s lucrative search advertising market. He didn’t specify the alleged misconduct.
I am not alone in considering this totally ludicrous. And it’s not what Google does or does not do, but that Ballmer has the audacity to complain in the wake of Microsoft’s own track record.
And therein lays the real problem.
The idea that if ‘they’ do it it’s unfair, immoral, or illegal, but if we do it it’s OK.
We saw it in the arguments of torture being acceptable on the detainees at Gitmo.
We see it in the political and religious leaders who preach high moral codes while practicing immorality.
We see it in business leaders who preach ethics and practice them only as long as it’s convenient.
We see it in parents who demand better education and then condemn any teacher that doesn’t give their child a good grade.
We see it in colleagues whom we complain of slacking only to do something similar ourselves.
We se it in friends who share our private information even as we share someone else’s.
To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the hypocrite and he is us.”
Crucial questions for startups and small businesses, since how they are addressed can make or break the company.
Often the most important hires made when a company wants to grow are in sales.
Founders and owners often have technical, marketing or business backgrounds and many have a tendency to shrug when it comes to sales.
They see hiring salespeople as no big deal—there is an assumption that as long as they have a good track record in their previous sales position and understand the new product they can manage themselves.
If this sounds off base to you, you’re right, it’s not that simple. To use a real-life example, I had a client who thought that way.
The CEO hired “Jack” (before my time), a salesman with a fantastic record selling a parallel product to the same market.
The CEO personally taught Jack the product line and explained what the company was working to accomplish and then pretty much gave him free reign.
In the year Jack was with them he sold only two accounts, spent a good deal of his time on marketing and managed one large client; commissions totaled only $15K.
When he left he went to work in a field completely unrelated to anything he’d done before and in a market about which he knew nothing. In his first year at the new company he earned over 125K in commissions.
The difference was management.
Based on his track record both the CEO and Jack assumed that he could manage himself.
However, Jack didn’t have, and didn’t create for himself, the structure, accountability, etc., necessary to be successful.
During his exit interview he admitted that although he had no knowledge or training in marketing, he spent substantially more time than he should have because it was new and exciting.
After the CEO and I had fully analyzed what happened he concluded that the failure was 80-20, with the 80% his responsibility.
Hind sight is 20/20 and my client believes that if he had taken the time to do what was needed, instead of expecting Jack to completely manage himself, that he would still be with the company and doing a spectacular job.
The important lesson here is that “self-starter” does not mean “self-managed.” Even the best will need direction, structure, and accountability in order to perform brilliantly.
Ask any employee at any level what motivates them the most
easy work
low performance standards
no consequences
or
challenging work
higher achievement
accountability
and 9 out of 10 will choose the second list.
So why do school boards do the opposite?
Many school districts follow the lead of the Dallas Independent School District, which follows the first list with slavish devotion.
What happens when the second list is followed instead?
One program is called early-college high school and it mixes college level courses with the normal courses taught in junior and senior years and is offered to at-risk kids, not the over-achieving elite.
“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.
In addition, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.
Started in 1994 as an experiment with 50 fifth graders in Houston’s inner city, KIPP has blossomed into the biggest U.S. charter school operator, with 82 schools for poor and minority children in 19 states.
KIPP now has an 85% college matriculation rate, compared with 40% for low-income students nationwide, according to a 2008 report card KIPP prepared and posted on its Web site. About 90% of KIPP’s 20,000 students are black or Hispanic; 80% qualify for subsidized meals.
The difference between the two lists can be summed up in one work—expectations.
The foundation of expectations is a belief that whatever it is can be accomplished.
We humans tend to strive to meet the expectations of those around us, be they bosses, friends, parents, teachers or school administrators.
Actions more than words tell us what is expected.
List 1 = low expectations and kids live up to them.
List 2 = high expectations and the kids live up to them.
Do you wonder what’s happened to people over the last century and into this one?
Did something change or was it always this way?
When did fudging, dissembling, dissimulating, equivocating, falsifying, fibbing, inventing, misleading, misrepresenting, misstating, and prevaricating become business as usual?
Call it what you will, it is still lying.
Leaders, followers, parents, kids; religious or not; whether business or personal, everybody does it.
We lie to avoid confrontation; improve results; sidestep repercussions.
We lie to our friends, parents, kids, congregations, clergy people, bosses, workers, colleagues and service providers.
From why something/someone is late to income tax to stock option backdating and corporate results to campaign promises and disagreeing ideologies—the list is both endless and all encompassing.
Most of us don’t see ourselves as liars, usually because there are “valid reasons” for it.
But ‘reasons’ don’t change the bottom line and Plato’s words ring as true today as when he spoke them,
“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
That infection has become a pandemic, spreading from one to another in both obvious and insidious ways.
It’s doubtful that there is any way to actually eradicate lying, but the next time you deviate from the truth think hard about your reasons; most of the time they won’t hold up.
I think if I read one more op-ed piece saying the path to improving US education is paved with better teachers I’ll scream.
I’m not saying that good teachers aren’t important, but I don’t believe that teachers are the root of the problems.
Before I start with examples, let me ask you this: how well would you perform if you were
terminated for insisting that projects not only be done, but done on time;
poorly compensated in comparison to most people with similar education and experience, but in other industries;
subject to pressure, tirades, insults and having people constantly go over your head to change your decisions; and
shown little respect by your direct reports, indirect reports and management.
Does that sound like an environment that would encourage you to do your utmost? I actually find it surprising that there are as many good, dedicated teachers as there are.
Staying with the current analogy, direct reports = students, indirect reports = parents and management = administrators.
Teaching is like any other form of work—it thrives in a good culture, sags, wilts and gives up in a bad one.
The Dallas Independent School System is a good example of what is happening. DISD is where the teacher was fired at the instigation of parents for being too tough and giving homework—the fact that the kids scored well on tests didn’t count.
It’s DISD that hired new teachers in 2007 with no way to pay them leading to a $64,000,000 budget shortfall that grew to about $84,000,000 in 2008. Their solution was to layoff the teachers—no damage to the administration idiots—maybe they all took math from teachers who passed them rather than lose their jobs.
Her rise in DISD in a span of three years has been frowned upon by some observers. She was making $87,000 as a division manager in 2006 and ended her career grossing around $140,000.
Some DISD trustees had questioned an organizational chart change that left her husband overseeing the department that she worked in. Her boss was reporting to her husband.
Ya think?
And then there is the saga of Taylor Pugh, AKA Tater Tot, who was growing his hair so he could donate it to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients—but his suburban Dallas school saw it as reason for in-school suspension for violating the district dress code.
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Back to our analogy. How engaged, productive and innovative would you be working for a company where management performed similarly?
Dallas isn’t alone; it has plenty of company across the country.
So before ranting and blaming the dismal state of US education on teachers, check out your district and state administrations—and then look in the mirror.
Life is about choices; we make choices every day that affect not only the immediate subject, but also those around us and our future.
Sometimes we don’t even notice the choices we make, but that doesn’t change the size of their effect.
The following is a teaching fable that has been around in various forms for years.
An old man told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside people.
He said, “The battle is between the two animals that live inside us all.
One is Evil—it is made of anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good—it is joy, peace, love, authenticity, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, and compassion.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wins the battle?”
The old man replied, “The one you feed.”
It is with your choices, not just the conscious ones, but all of them, that you feed the beasts.
You can never rid yourself of all the traits that comprise either the evil or the good beast, but you can control their size, frequency and intensity.
It’s your choice.
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.
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The Hart Research Associates poll showed that top executives are even more disliked than politicians. … The vast majority of potential jurors see corporate CEOs as greedy and willing to break the law.” –LA Times, 11/10/09
It’s a sad day when business leaders are lower on the trust pole than politicians. Actually, I didn’t think any group could be rated lower than politicians.
The saddest part is that the great majority of men and women running small, medium and even large companies don’t lie, cheat or steal; they aren’t particularly greedy and they don’t break the law.
The problem is that many of those who do fit the profile, and there are plenty, run high profile companies in the same or related industry—think financial services and autos to name two glaring examples.
I think part of what’s going on is the spread of the lemming mentality.
You see it a lot in the venture world. During the internet boom no matter how good your business plan if it wasn’t .com you could pretty much forget getting funded. These days the magic markets are green/clean tech, healthcare and mobile anything. In other words, if one jumps off a cliff all the rest will follow.
I have a friend who says that the more expensive the suit the lower his initial trust level; I might agree except that I’m sure that the folks wearing them are aware of the prejudice. Therefore, I have to believe that they are either arrogant enough to believe we are all dumb/disinterested/ignorant not to notice or they just don’t give a damn.
The real question in all this is what are we going to do about it?
Are we going to wring our collective hands, tar all business with the same brush, lament the mentality that drives our distrust and then let it all sink back into the muck when the economy turns around—out of sight, out of mind?
Or are we going to get active, demand better accountability, force business leaders to toe an ethical line and avoid our normal memory loss?
Raising kids is about teaching values, among other things, but kids learn by watching more than by listening. “Do as I say, not as I do” just doesn’t fly these days.
Cheating is not only a good example, it’s a global one.
Everyone knows that cheating is wrong, yet in US surveys 64% of high school students say they have cheated, while 84% of undergraduate business students and a whopping 56%of MBA students also admit to cheating. Not only is cheating prevalent, parental action often condones it.
Since many of these same parents are leaders in the workplace, the results of a McKinsey survey asking “which capabilities of organizations as a whole are most important for managing companies through the crisis” should come as no surprise.
Ability to shape employee interactions and foster a shared understanding of values.
Only 8% thought that important, which placed ’shared values’ dead last on the list of nine.
What was first on the list? The item considered the most important?
Ability to ensure that leaders shape and inspire the actions of others to drive better performance.
Number two isn’t much of an improvement.
Capacity to articulate where the company is heading and how to get there, and to align people appropriately.
All the research I’ve seen claims that the best way to avoid ethical lapses is to have sustainable ethics embedded deep in the company’s culture.
And the comments of Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, really resonate.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of the McKinsey findings is the suggestion that providing leadership is somehow separate from promoting values. In fact, the two are bound together—the double helix of any corporation’s DNA.
One would think that means the company’s leaders understand the value of values and would proactively work to foster and embed them.
But no, these leaders, likely the same one whose kids admit to cheating, believe that visions trump values.
Anyone who knows me knows that hypocrisy and fanaticism are tied for first place on my list of things-that-I-detest.
How flat should an organization be?
So why do school boards do the opposite?
Do you wonder what’s happened to people over the last century and into this one?
Life is about choices; we make choices every day that affect not only the immediate subject, but also those around us and our future.
The Hart Research Associates poll showed that top executives are even more disliked than politicians. … The vast majority of potential jurors see corporate CEOs as greedy and willing to break the law.” –
Raising kids is about teaching values, among other things, but kids learn by watching more than by listening. “Do as I say, not as I do” just doesn’t fly these days.
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