If you read any of the hundreds of how-to books written about good people management and leadership, you’ll find great similarities among them. So, what happens during implementation? Why can the de facto difference between managers be so enormous?
The answer goes back to one of two basic beliefs that are formed and held long before a person becomes a manager.
People are intelligent, motivated, and really care about helping their company achieve its objectives.
People are stupid, don’t care, and will screw up if you don’t watch them every minute. Variations of A are discussed, lauded, and underlay most “good” management practices. Variations of B are rarely admitted, infrequently discussed, and can be largely unconscious.
Think of it as a scale
A
B
10_____________________0_____________________ 10
Do managers on the B side of the scale always fail while those on the A side are guaranteed success? Unfortunately no.
What does this mean to you? If you’re a current or future manager, you need to be aware of where you are on the scale and then decide if that’s where you want to be—information that is nobody elses business.
If you like where you are, do nothing, you’re all set.
But if you decide to alter your location on the scale, remember that change rarely happens when undertaken as a result of what “they” say, so be sure that it’s you who wants to change.
Would you like to work for a company where the 401K matching on 5% of salary is as much as 11%? Where you can become a manager earning $62,000 plus bonus and company car with no college degree, no Union, no trade—nothing but hard work.
Of course, you’ll have to put up with snickers and even scorn if you mention your job in public.
All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.
“While an average McDonald’s grosses $2.2 million a year, seasoned managers who motivate employees and keep customers coming back can add more than $200,000 to that total.“Restaurant managers are in the most important position in our company,” says Richard Floersch, McDonald’s chief human resources officer.”
Moreover, with corporate culture being recognized as the moving force behind corporate performance, why is it that articles about changing culture in major corporations employing mostly skilled, well-paid workers, such as IBM, are met with serious discussion, while changing it in major corporations with mostly minimum wage earners, such as McDonalds, is marked down as hype?
Why was a cultural change at IBM seen as key to the company’s survival, but instilling pride in the workers at McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC is viewed as hype, “Raising spirits is cheaper than raising salaries.”
Why do we expect young people to take pride in their first ‘real’ job, or care about the customer, when they were laughed at for the same attitudes/actions in their minimum wage job?
Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when they are honest, hardworking, raise families and even pay taxes, which is more than you can say for their wealthier counterparts?
In the same vein, why is the four-year grad, with a degree paid for by mom and dad, considered a better candidate than the one who took longer working ‘non-professional’ jobs to pay for the same degree from the same school?
Maybe companies need to wake up. No matter what their family’s economic status, I haven’t seen the same high sense of entitlement in kids who spent their summers working in average and minimum wage jobs as I have in the ones who worked frequently overpaid jobs for their parents or didn’t work at all.
Do you think that segregation is an anachronism? A mindset and action we put behind us with the rise of the Civil Rights movement? Think again.
Segregated activities are alive and well in many small towns.
But these days, instead of turning on and dropping out like the Boomers, or turning on and apathetic like Gen X, kids get involved, even when it makes their lives more difficult.
“In 1997, Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the senior prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi under one condition: the prom had to be racially integrated. His offer was ignored. In 2008, Freeman offered again. This time the school board accepted, and history was made. … Freeman’s generosity fans the flames of racism—and racism in Charleston has a distinctly generational tinge. Some white parents forbid their children to attend the integrated prom and hold a separate white-only dance. “”Billy Joe,”” an enlightened white senior, appears on camera in shadow, fearing his racist parents will disown him if they know his true feelings.”
Not only did they have the prom, with none of the dire consequences predicted and used as the reason not to integrate it, but Paul Saltzman’s documentary Prom Night in Mississippi became a Sundance Festival sensation.
Kids are impatient for change—but they always have been. And in some variation of Moore’s Law each generation’s impatience increases, while their tolerance for whatever is current decreases.
Another day, another leadership book. I sometimes wonder how far around the earth they would stretch if laid end to end. Most have viable lessons, useable by everyone, not just the person running the show.
Many of the attitudes, actions and lessons learned and offered are similar, but each seeks a teaching mechanism that will catch and hold your interest.
Not an easy task in a time of information abundance.
Chris Warner and Don Schmincke manage to do it in High Altitude Leadership.
It’s not that their leadership guidance is new, but the presentation is riveting.
I like it because it directly addresses MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and offers examples from a world where screwing up easily results in death—real death as in gone from the world, not the company.
Amazing how different the advice feels when viewed through the lens of the “death zone,” i.e., the top altitude of the planet’s tallest mountains where mistakes are usually fatal.
“In achieving peak performance as a high-altitude leader, you also risk death. It could be the death of a career, project, team or company, or in extreme situations, someone’s physical death. Learning the best way to succeed comes from studying the death zone.”
Chris Warner is founder of Earth Treks (indoor climbing centers) and has led more than 150 international expeditions.
Don Schmincke started as a scientist and engineer who became a management consultant after realizing that most management theories fail to work.
There are eight dangers in the death zone and, although the authors stress that it’s the high altitude leaders that face the same eight dangers, I think that everybody faces them every day and in all facets of their lives.
The dangers are
Fear of Death
Selfishness
Tool Seduction
Arrogance
Lone Heroism
Cowardice
Comfort
Gravity
Not really new information, but when seen in the light of the death zone they have a very different impact.
High Altitude Leadership is an exciting, sometimes hair-raising read (even when the transference to business doesn’t work well) that will get you thinking whether you’re heading a Fortune 50 or trying to raise your kids. It’s a book that helps you see the problems in your own MAP.
What the book doesn’t offer are easy, paste on solutions—changing how you think means changing your MAP which is doable, but not easy.
A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.
There was a time when attitudes and actions moved from older to younger.
But it seems that more and more, instead of children learning from their grandparents, the grandparents are adopting the attitudes of the kids and, as with girls in gangs, it’s not the good ones that are moving—it’s the worst.
Entitlement. Instant gratification.
There are thousands who knowingly bought homes they couldn’t afford (as opposed to buying out of financial ignorance and/or mortgage chicanery) because they wanted it now, not in three to five years when they could actually afford it.
When I was young I thought the same way, but there were all kinds of adults who, by example, showed me that that wasn’t the way the world worked.
Now, with these attitudes spread throughout the generations, where are the everyday examples that show a different way? Worse, the examples that are out there are often ridiculed as being out of step with the current world.
I know that some of you reading my Thursday posts wonder what they have to do with leadership, managing and business.
The answer is simple; these are the people who work for and with you; they are the people you hire now and the people you’ll be hiring for decades.
Can you build a successful business or non-profit of any size on attitudes of entitlement and instant gratification?
No question, men and women think differently—at work, at home and in every other situation.
And for years the argument has raged as to which approach is better; which thinking clearer; which to follow.
When ignored, the differences are the basis for miscommunication and the resultant misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, frustration and anger.
In rare shows of common sense, some companies focus on understanding the differences, sharing the intelligence across their workforce and creating a stronger corporate culture that takes advantage of both sets of styles and skills. The result is more employee satisfaction, improved productivity, and better retention—all direct contributions to the bottom line.
If you’d like to get a handle on this Leadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business is a good place to start. Authored by Michael Gurian, best-selling The Wonder of Boys, and Barbara Annis, a top consultant on gender issues, the book provide and in depth look at two decades of both scientific research and real-world anecdotal evidence that different isn’t better or worse, or, as Gurian says, “I think what we’ve been able to prove over the last 20 years is that there is not superiority or inferiority.”
Homogeny isn’t good, especially in business. To interact and do commerce with the real world requires not only diversity of thought—gender, racial, ethnic—but respect for and the ability to interact and work together for a common goal.
The major part of Leadership And The Sexes is in the form of five gender tools that walk you through a process to help you understand the differences and effectively deal with them.
GenderTool 1 Improving Your Negotiating Skills with Both Genders
GenderTool 2 Running a Gender-Balanced Meeting
GenderTool 3 Improving Your Communication Skills with Men and Women
GenderTool 4 Improving Your Conflict Resolution Skills with Men and Women
GenderTool 5 Practicing Gender-Intelligent Mentoring and Coaching in Your Corporation
Written as pure brain science the book would be much drier, but the real-world examples and anecdotes offered save it from that and make for a more relatable read.
The need to acquire gender-intelligence is undisputed, whether for your company or yourself.No matter what you do or how powerful you are gender-intelligence will help you improve.
Finally, to give you an additional inducement to dig into this subject and absorb what it offers, here’s an interview with Michael Gurian.
He remembers the time when CEOs were all-powerful autocrats running top-down organizations under the auspices of Boards comprised friends and colleagues. The came the revolt and CEOs started being dumped right and left.
How large was the turnover tally last year and was it really that different from what it used to be?
Generally speaking, prior to the 1990s CEOs weren’t fired. During the Nineties Boards ousted a few high profile cases, such as GM, IBM, American Express, but by mid-2000 things really started changing and have continued apace—663 in 2004, 1322 in 2005, 1478 in 2006, but ‘only’ 1,356 2007.
Of course, not all were fired, some retired, some took outside offers, but a great number left by, or just before, Board request and some left in a very public perp walk.
By the time the book came out, six years after Enron, most of us thought we’d seen the worst; we believed that governance had changed and that Boards and investor activists had tamed CEO ego.
Many thought that it was a permanent shift in power away from CEOs, but it took only a year to show how inaccurate that analysis was.
It might be true when dealing with felonious intention, but when it comes to “maximizing shareholder returns” it seems like anything legal still goes.
But even slightly out of date, Revolt in the Boardroom is a good read—educational, entertaining and offering some unique insights into the corner office.
Last year I wrote about the pros and cons of AMS (assumption, manipulation and self-fulfilling prophesy). As I said then, although there are positive aspects AMS usually surfaces in a negative way.A client who agrees with how important it is to avoid AMS asked me to come up with a simple, memorable way to present why assuming isn’t a good thing to do. He wanted something that would really sink in, not in a preachy way, but a fun way to which all his people could relate in all parts of their lives.
So I was staring at the word on the screen and that’s when I realized that we could use an oldie to put the idea across in just 13 words.
Now, scattered around the offices are signs that read
Think before you assume—don’t make an ass out of u and me!
By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.Building future leaders takes creative nurturing, because leaders are both born AND made. It’s up to us to do the “making” part.
There is a lot of failure on the track to leadership competence. It’s doubtful any of the leaders I know could have gotten there, if they had not been nurtured through failure. Even so-called “natural” leaders that have the combination of dominant and influencing personality styles need nurturing to make them successful.
A couple of weeks ago, CandidProf (guest blogger every Thursday) made note of the 2008-2009 standards for grading policy of the Dallas School District. He expressed some concern about the fact that, in an effort to reduce the high school dropout rate, this school district mandated that teachers give students multiple chances to pass tests, not give any student a “zero” score for any test or assignment (no matter what they did or did not do), and accept overdue assignments with no or minimal penalty.
While the policy seems like an easy one to condemn and seems to embody all the laziness and attitudes of entitlement we see in young persons applying for jobs these days, there are some interesting aspects of this that have application in business leadership development. Many persons have complained that this kind of approach to education in no way mirrors what those students might encounter in the working world. The reality, however, is that good management that has as its objective to develop strong leaders does use similar techniques.
The problem may be not so much in the policy itself, but rather in the lack of accountability that this approach seems to provide. I would go further and say that the real problem is that students are not given any vision for why they need to learn what is being taught. Every person needs to understand why they must do something painful — and learning can be very painful for children without a proper vision for the future. Employees also need that kind of vision-casting. Without a clear vision for why they are required to work harder and learn more, most people will resist.
Every leader I know has been nurtured by a mentor. Every one has been given the opportunity to fail along with support to understand how to succeed. Everyone has been given the opportunity to make mistakes within defined boundaries, because learning happens best in such an environment.
Within my own company, I made a point of creating mentoring relationships with and among employees. I continually created opportunities for employees to learn through failure while providing a “safety net” that meant they knew they would not be fired for failure, except in certain areas of behavior or where there was a clear indication that they were not capable of doing the job needed. They certainly were not put in a position where a failure could irreversibly harm the company, because that would have been bad leadership. But they were given the chance to experiment with making decisions and even making recommendations to our customers where appropriate to the level that they had proven themselves capable.
I was extremely successful in taking persons with little or no experience and making them not only highly-skilled in the difficult and somewhat obtuse business of strategic innovation consulting, but also capable of leadership of others. In fact, I discovered that it was far better for me to develop an inexperienced but motivated and qualified person into a leadership role over time than it ever was to hire a person already experienced through another company. It was far too painful trying to overcome the bad learning that the experienced person had gained somewhere else.
The secret to nurturing and developing these future leaders was simple in concept:
Give them a vision of what the future could look like for them.
Give them an “identity” as being part of a great organization that is doing something of real value.
Give them the basic skills and relational training they needed.
Provide them with “safe” ways to fail, followed by nurturing learning as to how to succeed next time.
Encourage them in failure and success.
Let them grow as quickly as they can take it, always supported by continuing encouragement, nurturing, and training.
Give them public praise when they have proven themselves of real leadership value.
The results were a highly motivated team that was (by measurements common to our industry) about twice as efficient as the average per salary dollar invested. They also were a cohesive team that liked each other and liked working there. And we were able to gain the kinds of clients that even much larger competitors only dreamed of getting. The biggest problems we had were from experienced persons who thought they should be given the chance to “lead” before they even understood what our company was all about.
So, if you want to develop strong future leaders (or just good employees), I would say the Dallas schools idea is not a bad one; it just requires strong vision-casting, nurturing, and encouragement to make it work.
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,
All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.
A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.
What a difference a year makes. Last year Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray wrote 
Building future leaders takes creative nurturing, because leaders are both born AND made. It’s up to us to do the “making” part.
