Read an Excerpt
Devil in the Details
The Practice of Situational Leadership
By Kevin J. Kennedy
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Kevin J. Kennedy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-2014-7
Chapter One
Hardwired for Drama
There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything ... is an inseparable compound of the two so that our best judgment is continuously demanded. — Abraham Lincoln
Whatever opinions you may hold about the Civil War in the United States, most professional and even armchair historians agree that President Lincoln was an effective leader in the face of a conflict that threatened to destroy the very essence of the United States. If you study his behavior, you see that he attempted to avoid drama in the way he thought about people and issues. He tended to probe beneath the apparently obvious solution to a problem until he found one he considered sensible and practical. Relying on the conventional wisdom of the day or getting swept up in the polarizing political rhetoric of a divided nation was not his style.
That's not an easy line to walk, either in the 1860s or today. Drama appeals to something basic in us, whether it plays out on television, in the headlines, or in the boardroom. The tendency to oversimplify, too, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche; it probably serves some essential survival purpose, helping us to distinguish between friend and foe in a dangerous situation, for example, or helping us make faster decisions in a crisis. But in everyday life, oversimplifying can cause problems. Just ask a trial attorney how often potential jurors pick the apparent hero over the apparent villain, even before they learn the complex nuances of a case.
As Lincoln suggested, drama and oversimplification don't work in your favor as a leader. One reason is that they narrow thinking rather than expand it. A business discussion can start to look like a caricatured debate, polarizing participants into either an affirmative or a negative position relative to the conventional wisdom about the situation at a particular moment in time. Meanwhile, the most positive choice may lie hidden among all the momentary details, invisible to those who are looking only at the surface. Effective leadership requires skill in navigation, answers are often found in the situational details, and it's usually more helpful to make a series of thoughtful operational judgments than to seek a quick fix.
Here, for example, are three pieces of conventional wisdom. They all sound good on the surface, but if they're swallowed whole, without any situational understanding, they can lead bright and well-meaning managers down a rat hole that's hard to climb out of.
Conventional Wisdom #1: Employees are naturally motivated to do what the company needs them to do. All they need is an inspiring leader who listens to them and to the company's customers.
Having observed several companies try to restructure and grow, I have come to the conclusion that everyone has an agenda of self-interest. It varies from employee to employee, and it may show up as any number of things: a thirst for compensation, work assignment, recognition, learning, a more comfortable office, and so on. That said, employees are not the same as their self-interest, and various situations may influence their choices. For example, it is not unusual to see a longtime employee operate in defense mode to protect his or her position, while a new hire may assume more risk when doing the same job. The new hire may lack institutional knowledge and organizational savvy, but she also has little attachment to the status quo and so may be more open to disruptions that will ultimately help the company.
Leaders, too, are powered by self-interest. They enjoy the respect and stimulation they get from guiding a business to success, and they also want to protect their positions and compensation. In an ideal world, the leader's self-interest will be linked firmly with the advancement of the company. Effective leaders find ways to bridge all the self-interests involved in the equation—their own and the employees', as well as the best interests of the company.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it takes more than an inspiring mission and a charismatic leader to motivate employees. Any leader who thinks the secret of good management is simply to listen to employees and customers is essentially picking two sets of heroes and ignoring the subtle interactions of multiple self-interests, including the leader's own.
Conventional Wisdom #2: A company's success is just a matter of its leadership.
We have all seen sports teams go from one coach to another with very little improvement in the lackluster results that spurred the leadership changes in the first place. The same thing happens in companies. Contrary to conventional wisdom, poor results are not solely the fault of the leader; a dynamic leader can be cut off at the knees if the organization doesn't know how to follow.
The reality is that many employees will never be in a formal leadership or even supervisory role at work, and nonmanagement employees typically outnumber management employees by a factor of eleven to one in the US workforce. [US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, 2010 data] What's more, most leaders are required to be followers in some situations, and followers need to be leaders in some settings. The point is that leadership and followership are equally important, both require development, and both skill sets develop best through situational experience. Yet the conventional wisdom encourages us to see only the leadership part of the pictureandeventotrivializeitspracticewhileignoringthefollowerswho give the term leader its meaning. The company that habitually spends millions of dollars recruiting and cultivating its executive team while ignoring the training and development needs of its middle managers and nonmanagement employees is apt to get caught in a vicious cycle of executive changes and chronic organizational underperformance.
Conventional Wisdom #3: Employees come to work seeking simply to do their assigned jobs within the range of desired behaviors.
While employees may be motivated by self-interest, they also want to be part of a team. They want to contribute and be rewarded. In other words, people are hardwired for drama while inspired by a greater good. The dramatic tension between the two forces is almost palpable in organizations. Employees are pulled by the force of drama and negative swirl. At the same time, they are susceptible to—and may even yearn for—the positive emotional fervor created by a compelling mission and greater purpose. This story illustrates the point.
Illustrative Story
During the first year of a public company turnaround, the new CEO brought in a new team of leaders. They came from a variety of backgrounds and had been successful in a variety of situations. They were all committed to the greater good of the turnaround and the development of a new company.
A turnaround is by nature an exercise in drama. The days are long, with full steps forward and half steps back, so momentum can be elusive. After the CEO had been in the job for three years and delivered the company's first profitable quarter in five years, she had to admit that the senior team had not fully congealed. They were individually strong and considered themselves good team players, yet they frequently came to the CEO with complaints or claimed to be victims of poor execution elsewhere in the organization. Seeking to break this behavior pattern, the CEO constructed a framework for discussion built upon a fundamental premise: in the absence of strong or corrective leadership, human beings gravitate to drama and blame. She drew the diagram below (Figure 1.1).
The horizontal axis (Thinking) denotes the spectrum of choices dominated by thought and judgment. On the positive (right) extreme, thought is driven by insight and learning. On the negative (left) extreme, thought is bounded by blame, loss of control, and so on.
The vertical axis (Emotion) denotes the spectrum of choices dominated by emotional response. On the positive (top) extreme, emotion is modulated in a predictable rhythm, measured and controlled. On the negative (bottom) extreme, drama reigns.
Now let's take a closer look at the four quadrants in this model.
In Quadrant 1 (Trust and Predictability), on the axis of emotions, behaviors are characterized by predictability, clarity of purpose, and strong beliefs. On the axis of thinking, behaviors are characterized by insight, fact-based decision making, anticipation, adaptation, and wisdom. Behaviors in this quadrant are especially productive in public companies, which are rewarded for profitability. Choices made in this quadrant lead to trust and progress.
Quadrant 3 (Drama) represents organizations or individuals characterized by dissidence. Problems may go unsolved for long periods while organizations or leaders blame one another or see themselves as habitual victims of circumstance. Each day brings a new level of drama as the sky is falling or crises stack up. While teams in Quadrant 1 gain energy from progress, leaders and teams in Quadrant 3 lose energy with every successive crisis. To state the obvious, this is an undesirable outcome. Yet if you think about it, we live in a world where our natural proclivity for drama is fed and exercised daily. Media thrives by constructing simple winner/loser scenarios in the most complex situations, or by tantalizing the public with manufactured cliffhangers on "reality" TV. People in many parts of the world are virtually bombarded with drama, and as media consumption data shows, they love it.
We humans are so prone to drama that we make up our own stories in the absence of facts. A Wall Street financial analyst I spoke with recently described his mission in covering a stock this way: "Analysts don't need to be wrong or right; we just need to have a point of view. We prosecute, and the buyers judge." As he saw it, providing good advice was not his goal. The goal was to have and communicate a point of view that would precipitate action, that is, buying or selling. Investors would construct their own story to fill in the gaps. His objective was to produce a reaction, and the mechanism for doing so was coverage. This is not surprising, considering that brokers make money on transactions!
Quadrant 2 (Call to Arms) is interesting. Leaders who choose to behave in this quadrant, such as a leader who deliberately creates a "burning platform" to inspire change, may be making a good choice for the situation at hand. However, even an insightful discussion may be a poor choice if it generates unwanted fear. Behaviors in this quadrant may be compelling, but in the absence of control, they can lead employees into a swirl of speculation, drama, and even dissidence.
Quadrant 4 (Hopelessness) is also interesting. Consider an employee who thinks he or she is invariably a victim, constantly blames others for mistakes, and is convinced that everyone else is underperforming. These people are often burned out, and they drain others of energy. Left unsupported, their health may suffer, sometimes to a debilitating degree.
People in Quadrants 1 and 2 are generally reliable and can be expected to progress, if they choose their behaviors deliberately and control them intelligently. People in Quadrant 3 require leadership or redeployment. People in Quadrant 4 require help. People whose behavior is stuck on the left side of the chart despite reasonably persistent efforts to help them should not be working for you. They will sap the positive energy of their colleagues and coworkers, and they'll ultimately detract from the company's bottom line.
The CEO found the Nexus of Behavior and Choices to be a helpful management tool. She used it when she asked her direct reports to reflect on how they had behaved in various situations. If they were truly to lead the organization, she suggested, they should strive to operate consistently on the right side of the diagram. Over time, this tool became a commonly understood and nonthreatening mechanism for discussing behaviors and choices. It helped leaders avoid the dramatic trap of describing people and events as good or evil, right or wrong.
By the way, unlike many two-by-two matrices, this one doesn't take as gospel that Quadrant 1 is always best. I learned that from personal experience. Several years ago I came home from work, and my wife told me she had been diagnosed with two serious, chronic ailments. At that moment, she was understandably in Quadrant 3. My natural response was to use behaviors from Quadrant 1. I sat her down and calmly asked one question at a time:
"What exactly did the doctor say?"
"What do we know for sure?"
"What don't we know?"
"What are the next steps?"
In hindsight, this approach may have been calming for me, but what my wife needed was a hug. In other words, at that moment she needed me to be in Quadrant 2, embracing her drama. I certainly felt I was being courageous in facing the facts head-on, and I was eager to learn the details (at least the details that mattered to me), but if I had stopped to think about where my wife was emotionally, I would have used a very different process.
Chapter Two
Tourists, Gatherers, and Collectors
We all know that everyone is different. We have our own hopes and dreams, strengths and weakness, personalities and emotions shaped over a lifetime. Even so, we behave more like some people than we do like others, and branches of social science including sociology, psychology, and anthropology couldn't survive unless there were some truth in the notion of "types" of people. In this chapter, we consider three types who are probably on your payroll: tourists, gatherers, and collectors. Let's start with the tourists.
I grew up in a small town on the New Jersey shore. Every summer, we watched the tourists invade. They hit the beach with pasty bodies, set up their lounge chairs and coolers, burned quickly, and left the beach riddled with empty cans and wasted sunscreen tubes. The tourists came to our town for a weekend of exuberance and went home Sunday evening physically spent and emotionally calmed. On Mondays they told stories of riding the big waves, outdrinking the locals, and performing athletic wonders in pickup basketball games. While they were back at their offices bragging about their exploits, our beach cleanup crews worked all week in preparation for another onslaught. We considered tourists one of Nature's less appealing creations. As we saw it, the tourists gobbled up the best of our town and left nothing of value. But to them, their weekends were just plain fun.
Now let's leave the beach and enter the workplace. Think about the last cross-functional team meeting you attended. How many people were there, and why were they there? How many said they would be glad to help but really didn't know very much about the situation and so couldn't add much to the discussion? How many were there only because they didn't want to be left out? How many were there simply so they could speculate later about who might get in trouble for something that was said or done? How many probably won't bother to go to any future meetings because they "didn't get anything out of" the last one? In other words, how many tourists were in that meeting?
There are two other types who might have been in your meeting. One is the gatherer. I have a dear friend who calls himself a gatherer of watches. He doesn't know much about them, but he finds them beautiful, and owning them makes him feel good. It's harmless enough. In a business setting, though, gatherers aren't always so benign. They come to the table with a specific and self-interested agenda, and they listen for and share only the information that is likely to advance that agenda. For example, maybe you know someone who fiercely believes his group should have a larger budget and therefore is hyperalert to "evidence" that groups with more money are spending unwisely. Now, a gatherer may actually have a legitimate purpose in mind. Maybe his or her boss asked the gatherer to attend the meeting and bring back specific information related to that group's work, for example. In that case, rather than crowd the meeting with noncontributing gatherers, the meeting organizer could simply include that person when the post- meeting notes are distributed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Devil in the Details by Kevin J. Kennedy Copyright © 2012 by Kevin J. Kennedy. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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