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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

John’s worst career mistake happened after a reorganization. His new manager, part of the new executive leadership team, had asked his opinion on several issues.

John cheerfully complied. Big mistake.

Executives are smart to learn as much about each new area of responsibility as they can. That means taking their direct reports to lunch, asking questions, and listening carefully. John’s new manager did exactly what she was supposed to do.

John achieved his goals in this conversation. He demonstrated his encyclopedic grasp of technology, his extensive knowledge of how to run IS, and his philosophy of leadership — which was based in large part on a management “initiative” that had been extolled as the Next Big Thing by the previous CEO. He figured he’d done a great job of impressing his new boss.

And he had. He’d impressed her with his insights, his range, and his leadership potential — and with his lack of interest in her insights, range, leadership, plans, and goals. Even worse, he demonstrated loyalty to the old regime. In short, he’d established himself as a potential troublemaker but not as a likely source of support.

So John went into “special projects,” wondering what had gone wrong and feeling bitter about his enforced change of career direction.

Served him right.

Executives get a lot of flak for bringing in management fads — panaceas that will make the company a great place to work, increase market share, generate awesome shareholder value, and cure the common cold. The flak is largely undeserved. Although these fads rarely accomplish anything, they’re the inevitable result of people doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. If you want to avoid John’s fate, you need to understand the dynamics of management fads.

Most fads fall into one of two categories. The first, Humoring a Promising Subordinate (HAPS) happens when the CEO wants to provide an opportunity for a protege. The protege reads about a promising new something and voila! HAPS happens.

You can recognize HAPS by the lack of CEO commitment. You’ll hear lip service, and you’ll probably attend a training session, but you’ll find the CEO’s attention focused on more pressing matters, such as new product development, a change in market focus, or improving the company’s key ratios.

Follow the leader. Give the HAPS lip service and whatever attention you think it deserves based on its intrinsic merits. HAPS can offer very good ideas. It just doesn’t represent the company’s strategic direction.

The more dangerous fads are Strategic Company Directions (SCDs) sponsored directly by the CEO and leadership team. They are major change initiatives, intended to transform the organization. Typically, SCDs won’t pay off for several years — three years is the minimum for total quality management, for example — and they can’t succeed unless the whole company gets behind them.

CEOs don’t get three years. Unless short-term results are strong, the board will find a new CEO. Since the board doesn’t hire a new CEO to implement ideas that didn’t work, that big SCD is yesterday’s news — a fad.

When faced with an SCD, commit to it. Do everything you can to make it succeed. If and when the company leadership changes, make it clear that you’re an implementer, not an advocate, and that you’ll work just as hard to implement the new team’s strategic direction. In other words, listen before you opine.

There are no bad guys here. Shareholders invest wanting prices to rise immediately, not three years from now. Boards of directors serve shareholders. The CEO answers to the board — no leeway there — and the rest of management follows along. Remarkably, the long-term health of the company isn’t anyone’s top priority — except, perhaps, employees’. And many companies, by their actions, discourage employee loyalty.

Sure, there are some executives who move from fad to fad like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. They’re the exception. Most are doing what they’re paid to do. They’re trying to define, articulate, and create the future company according to their vision, not someone else’s.

I know. I was John.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

A few weeks ago we talked about the hiring process being badly broken. I expected a flame war. Instead, large numbers of you wrote to express your agreement and relate anecdotes in support of the article’s premise: that in too many companies, Human Resources screens out those applicants most likely to succeed in favor of those who on paper have the best skill-to-task match.

Here’s the greatest story of them all: a well-known anecdote from the inner workings of the Disney organization, shared by a source I trust. About twenty years ago some enterprising cynic sent Walt Disney’s resume (with only the name changed) through the Disney staffing process. He was rejected.

Walt Disney, it appears, just wouldn’t work well at Disney, and what’s funniest about this is that he may indeed have been a poor fit. You may be a poor fit for your organization, as it happens. Ask yourself how well you would do, if you had to work for someone like you. Are you the kind of manager you’d want to work for?

If not, you have some personal changes to make. Heck, even if you answered yes you have some personal changes to make. Management is a tough, competitive environment. Businesses have to continuously improve just to survive, and so do you because there’s always some hotshot out there who wants your job.

This column, though, isn’t about personal growth and change. It’s about the opposite. It’s about a manager I once worked for – call him “Bill” because that wasn’t his name – who had a reputation for being a maverick.

I liked working for Bill because he didn’t run with the herd. Bill sponsored end-user computing before the PC era, when most DP professionals (this was before DP turned into MIS) thought of end-users as parasites on their systems. Bill advocated prototyping when DP believed in structured design. And he believed in incremental development when DP taught waterfall methodologies – his favorite phrase was, “Every big system that works started out as a small system that worked.”

Being a maverick doesn’t get you ahead in most companies. For better or worse, most companies value getting along far more than they value challenging conventional wisdom. Bill’s career hit a plateau with a lower-middle management title. His boss – the head of DP – told him in no uncertain terms that he’d have to become a team player if he wanted to get anywhere.

So Bill tried valiantly to become a team player. He started to promote the party line in his staff meetings, stopped marketing our services inside the company as an alternative to traditional DP, and tried to get along with his peers.

Within a year he was gone.

Bill’s mistake, I think, was that he ignored who he was and tried to succeed by being someone he wasn’t. Personal growth is one thing. Professional growth is another. There’s a line you should never cross, though. It isn’t clearly marked, and it’s awfully hard to see. That’s the line marking the boundary between self-improvement and self-denial.

There’s a phrase that made the rounds a few years back. Every so often I’d read about some person or other who had “reinvented himself”. This is ManagementSpeak for “became a big phony” I think. Someone described David Letterman in these terms when he went mainstream during his move to CBS. So the guy with “The World’s Most Dangerous Band” became the guy with “The CBS Orchestra”.

I look in Letterman’s eyes and I see a guy who’s lost his soul. I saw the same desperate look in Bill’s eyes when he was trying to succeed at being a team player. He wasn’t very good at being the new Bill because his heart just wasn’t in it. And he’d decided the old Bill had to go. That didn’t leave him with much to hang his hat on.

You should be on a constant self-improvement program. Decide where you’re weakest, and figure out a program for becoming great at whatever it is. During the process, though, understand your essence, and find a career path that builds on it rather than denying it.

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