How business leaders use the news

Balance, it appears, is the new political incorrectness.

Unsubscribes peaked following last week’s satire that drew parallels between voter outrage and how bad bosses have treated people over the years. It was clear many would have had no problem with the subject matter had I validated their outrage instead.

Now don’t go away … this column is about you as a business leader, not matters of public policy. Honest. Stay with me.

The subject: How business leaders should interpret the news. It’s an invaluable source of insights about organizational dynamics you can profit from every day, based on publicly available examples (which is why I use it here). But only if you approach it from the correct angle (as opposed to the right angle, or the left). Here’s why:

One of the biggest challenges business leaders face is knowing What’s Going On Out There. The larger the enterprise, the tougher the challenge, as:

• Ambitious executives and middle managers present one-sided, carefully edited, or otherwise distorted pitches to promote their private agendas.
• Managers at all levels filter out important information that might be construed as a demonstration of poor performance.
• Organizational rivals whisper negativities about each other into the information echo-chamber called the corporate grapevine.

Looks to me a lot like our daily political commentary.

Take the Department of Agriculture’s firing of Shirley Sherrod, which raised eyebrows and hackles last week. In case you missed it, a heavily edited version of a speech she delivered to a local NAACP group appeared on a blog known for creative video resequencing. The post managed to perfectly invert her actual message.

The DoA leadership (or, perhaps, “leadership”) asked her to resign immediately, in time for the evening news cycle.

As a business leader, ignore the political context entirely. Race relations, the blogosphere as information source, the caliber of Obama’s cabinet team … they don’t matter. Smart business leaders gained two important business insights instead.

The first: Be alert to the let’s-you-and-him-fight game. The unwary fall for it all the time. One political player describes something awful a rival did that requires immediate intervention. They jump in to save the day, and end up like Sherrod’s bosses: In deep with both feet.

Had the DoA agency heads understood this point, instead of calling for Sherrod’s immediate resignation they’d have first asked Sherrod for her version of events.

The second, even more important insight: Don’t bypass your organization’s Human Resources policies and procedures. They’re there for a reason and it isn’t pointless bureaucracy. Had DoA’s leaders followed the HR procedure manual there’d have been no story at all.

To gain insights from the news you first have to develop a mental habit – one that’s invaluable for business leaders – and that’s to avoid the my-team/your-team mentality.

People who read the news with a my-team/your-team orientation promote their side’s talking point of the week while deploring the other side’s response and own talking point of the week. As dividing the world into us and them seems to be hard-wired in our DNA, it would be an easy mental habit to fall into even without all the shouting from political leaders and commentators who encourage it, and encourage us to deciding which sources of information we trust and distrust base on which team they’re on.

Recognizing my-team/your-team thinking when evaluating the news will help you dodge attempts to manipulate you with it at the office, where you are immensely vulnerable to anyone you trust solely because you and they belong to the same organizational silo.

Failing to recognize it immunizes you from important knowledge you might otherwise gain from members of rival organizational silos.

Which is death, because inside your company, the rival silos ought to be collaborating, to figure out how to beat competitors in the marketplace, not each other in the halls of the corporation. Within our companies, as in our national dialog, smart leaders … true leaders … recognize the difference between opponents and enemies.

Your goal lies beyond yourself – it’s to create a culture of honest inquiry, and of collaboration. You have to start with yourself, and how you choose your trusted sources of ideas and information. Here’s a useful place to begin:

Some sources interpret evidence based on their worldview, and explain both. Others cherry-pick, spin, or simply invent information as necessary to buttress their worldview, distorting one to promote the other.

Treasure the former. Ignore the latter completely. Practice with the news. Put it into practice at the office.

* * *

And farewell to one of the all-time great sources of trustworthy information and analysis, Daniel Schorr. In a wonderful Washington Post eulogy, Patricia Sullivan revealed this little-known tidbit: “During a spur-of-the-moment collaboration with musician Frank Zappa at a get-out-the-vote event in Washington, he sang two Gershwin songs, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and ‘Summertime.’”

By definition, a guy like that will always be on my team.