All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

“Why can’t a woman,” asked Henry Higgins, “be more like a man?”

The fate of the 2020 election just might hinge on that question. Your evaluation of female management candidates, and their strategies for persuading you to hire or promote them, might hinge on it as well.

Caveat first: Selecting a presidential candidate is, at best, imperfectly analogous to selecting a manager, just as running for office is imperfectly analogous to applying for a management position. Among the differences: Candidates for management jobs won’t debate each other in an open forum, nor will they assemble large organizations to lobby you to hire them.

Filters second: While the original field of Democratic candidates included six women, only three are worth talking about. Kirsten Gillibrand was embarrassing, providing little more than vague generalities, and not many of those. Tulsi Gabbard’s contributions to our political dialog have been puzzling at best. And as a candidate, I’d say Marianne Williamson was a joke, except that jokes are supposed to be funny.

That leaves Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. Was sexism the reason none of them made the cut? Do you or should you have similar concerns about your management team?

Opinion: Ascribing the Democratic Party’s results to sexism oversimplifies the situation. After all, in 2016 the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton, who then received three million more votes than her opponent in the general election. The Democratic Party can and has nominated a woman; American voters were willing to elect one.

So while women, whether in politics or business, still have to contend with the Ginger Rogers syndrome (she had to do everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels), sexism is not the sole reason Harris, Klobuchar, and Warren lost.

Another reason: Imagine you’re interviewing a management candidate and she makes an impassioned case for why one of the other candidates isn’t fit for the job.

It’s a bad interview move, and roughly equivalent to Harris resurrecting school busing as an issue to flog Joe Biden with, likewise Warren’s verbal assault on Michael Bloomberg. Credit where it’s due: while Klobuchar did go after Buttigieg, her heart didn’t seem to be in it.

Regrettably, her heart didn’t seem to be in her policy proposals either. She seemed more interested in asserting she could do the job than in explaining how she’d go about it.

Warren? Her “I have a plan for that!” tagline made her interesting, but her plethora of plans violated the sponsor-no-more-than-three rule effective leaders follow. Having a detailed plan for each thing meant she had no plan for everything. At least, no plan voters could keep in their heads all at once.

So a non-sexism-based interpretation is that Biden and Sanders haven’t survived because they’re old white guys. It’s that Sanders has focused passionately on what he would do as president; Biden has emphasized how he would lead the country. Neither has wasted time and energy attacking the other candidates.

But Biden and Sanders made plenty of mistakes too. These weren’t exactly ignored, but neither Sanders’ praise for Fidel Castro nor Biden’s non-arrest in South Africa did much damage.

Is it a clear case of Ginger Rogersism?

Maybe. But I think something else has been at work too: Which of the candidates was more “presidential.”

Personally I found Buttigieg, who had, based on his resume, no business even being in the audience, more presidential than anyone else. He was thoughtful, imperturbable, focused, and genuine. And, he left a positive impression that’s hard to describe and articulate.

For me, Biden and Sanders seem more presidential than Warren, even before her strange and pointless Bloomberg take down; likewise Klobuchar and Harris.

But … and this is the point of this column … how I define and gauge presidentiality, and, similarly, how I define and interpret business leadership and management potential, is to a significant extent a matter of conditioning. I have a lifetime of exposure to and working with and for business leaders who were, with few exceptions, male.

That experience has inexorably led to how I evaluate potential leaders and managers.

It’s sexism via immersion. I imagine that, no matter your gender, you’re in the same situation.

And so, whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired for a management role, think hard about how your impressions of what leaders and managers look and sound like have been conditioned by your experience.

Adjust your evaluation accordingly.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2009, business managers had to deal with the H1N1 virus. Then, as now, the two great unknowns in the early stages were contagion and virulence — how easily the virus passed from a sick person to healthy ones and how sick it made people when it did.

Then as now, business management had to prepare for the threat in spite of these unknowns.

Fortunately for all of us, adults — principally the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) — were in charge of the response, and the actual rates of contagion and mortality were quite a lot lower than we all originally feared.

The KJR Risk-Response Dictum states that successful prevention is indistinguishable from absence of risk. And so, predictably, instead of giving those coordinating the risk response credit for a job well done, much of the commentary blamed them for inflating the size of the problem.

Early indicators suggest COVID-19’s virulence, as assessed by its mortality rate, is significantly higher than the flu — 2.3 percent vs 0.1 percent, although on the opposite end of the virulence scale it appears 80 percent of cases will be mild or entirely asymptomatic.

Its relative level of contagion hasn’t yet been determined, although one epidemiologist predicts shockingly high numbers: a 40 to 70 percent infection rate by the time the current wave has run its course.

The risk of willful ignorance is not, on the other hand, in doubt, and will inevitably result in the two worst threat responses: hysteria and minimization.

And so, before I continue, here are links to four must-read articles to help you prepare for the current threat.

I’ll immodestly recommend two H1N1-oriented articles from Keep the Joint Running: “Threat management — the political plan” (10/12/2009) and “Issue Management: What the methodologies leave out” (10/19/2009).

I’d also advise you to review an excellent business preparedness guide developed and maintained by the CDC: “Interim Guidance for Businesses and Employers to Plan and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), February 2020.“

And, share this useful article from the WHO with those you work with: “Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public: Myth busters.”

What else should you do to, if you’ll forgive the self-reference, keep the joint running in the face of the COVID-19 threat?

First and foremost, list what, from a purely business perspective, COVID-19 threatens. Recognizing that I’m not an authority on threat assessment and response (if you are, please add your knowledge in the Comments), here are three of the most serious consequences:

Productivity loss: More employees will be out sick than your current plans factor in, and for more days. Adjust your business plans accordingly.

Knowledge loss: You should already have made sure that between documentation and cross-training, your organization can continue to function should anyone “call in rich” or fall prey to the proverbial bus.

With apologies for sounding morbid, COVID-19 could prove lethal to a team member who contracts it. The need to prevent knowledge loss isn’t new to the COVID-19 threat, but the virus does accentuate it.

Fight or flight response: “The only thing we have to fear,” FDR famously said, “is fear itself.” With all due deference to FDR, fear itself isn’t the only legitimate COVID-19 fear. Contagion and virulence surely belong on the list, too.

Take out “only” and FDR was on target. Inevitably, some employees will display the usual fear-itself threat response: Anger. Anger makes people stupid. And, inevitably, angry people need someone to attach their anger to. They’ll have a strong need to find someone to blame. And if blaming that someone for the direct threat is completely implausible they’ll find something related to blame them for.

The most likely “thems” are, sad to say, racial and ethnic, but they’re hardly the only ones. Very high on the list of Those-Whose-Fault-It-Must-Be will be everyone who subscribes to a competing political affinity.

Then there’s the ever-popular hobby of finding fault with company management and its response to the situation.

What makes the fight-or-flight response most dangerous is that, even by COVID-19 standards, it’s highly contagious.

But, unlike COVID-19, you can do something to reduce this contagion. First, be armed with facts and when you hear misinformation, correct it.

And second, when you overhear fight-or-flight conversations about COVID-19, stop them.

You can do this and you should do this. It’s easy. Just ask, “Don’t you have work to do?

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