Leadership – Page 274

Dress codes for success?

Target Corporation recently renounced casual attire as an acceptable form of dress among its employees. While the policy change received wide attention, the company’s logic for doing so has not (the company did not comment on the subject to the press). Neither has the irony: The only clothing you can buy at Target is casual. Target recently sold Marshall Fields, where its employees can buy formal clothing, to the May Corporation.

Maybe it was to avoid a conflict of interest.

My personal opinion, supported by not much more than my own judgment and experience, is that when business executives have enough time on their hands to worry about whether some programmer is wearing a tie, or an accounting clerk’s shoes are open-toed, the company is badly overstaffed … in the executive ranks.

I’m not entirely alone, either: Another Minnesota-based company that’s enjoyed at least a modicum of success has taken the opposite tack: General Mills spokeswoman Mary Beth Thorsgaard was quoted as saying, “We tell people to dress for their day. Any questions about what is accepted should be directed to a manager, but people are getting the concept.”

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft, which some folks think has performed fairly well, does not require its employees to wear suits.

The Business Research Lab cites several benefits for moving to business casual, all messages from management to staff:

Flexibility on the part of management.
A willingness to do things the “new way.”
Management does not seek to “control” employees.
There is a system of promotion in place that does not favor those who have had the good fortune to be born in the more affluent classes.

It appears The Business Research Lab advocates a casual approach to parallel construction as well as business attire, but the points it makes are nonetheless well-taken.

The last is particularly noteworthy. Anyone can dress neatly, but formal business attire reinforces a caste system with two sources. First, those raised in affluence had good clothing in their childhood wardrobes and learned early to dress well. And second, the well-to-do, among them a company’s executives, can afford higher-quality suits.

It’s commonplace for business executives to complain that employees “naturally” resist change, ignoring the extent to which they resist change themselves. Resistance to casual attire in the workplace is a notable example. It’s hard to avoid wondering if one reason so many executives find this change disconcerting is that it symbolically reduces their elevated status.

The executive preference for necktie-wearing is surprising, too. More business executives are politically conservative than liberal. The French opposed the war in Iraq. Ever since, political conservatives have derided all things French, and the necktie is a French invention, so you’d think necktie-burning would have become a conservative cause celebre (if you’ll forgive my French).

Instead, many and perhaps most business executives have been grudging in their acceptance of this trend. Many, for example, discuss casual, sloppy, and revealing attire as if they were the same — possibly a symptom of simple confusion, but just as likely a rhetorical ploy intended to discredit the first by linking it with the second and third.

Certainly, revealing attire is distracting and unprofessional and has no place in most work environments (those where it is appropriate are outside the scope of this column). And while sloppy attire is generally unacceptable, there are exceptions. If you don’t think so, you haven’t come in on a weekend to help pull cable and move equipment.

Business casual is neither sloppy nor revealing. It’s just casual. Does it confer an advantage, a disadvantage, or some of each? The only hard evidence I’ve been able to find is that the longest economic expansion in history occurred as U.S. businesses relaxed their dress codes. Does that mean the move to business casual should get the credit? Of course not, but if casual dress reduces productivity, business productivity shouldn’t have increased, should it?

There have been studies. The evidence on either side is, however, shaky, as both sides of the debate rely, so far as I can tell, on nothing more than survey data. The result is neither more nor less reliable than the average bias of those surveyed.

In the absence of reliable evidence, my best advice is this: Be a leader, not a fashion consultant. Your job is to focus employees on what they’re supposed to accomplish, not on how they’re supposed to dress.

Be as ROTten as you like

Crankiness is a sure-fire motivator for writing a punchy, sarcastic column. The downside: It doesn’t always lead to the most tactful recommendations.

David Carlson wrote to suggest, gently, that my final recommendation for responding to someone who tells you to face reality wasn’t particularly useful.

He’s right, too. While not as sarcastic as “Here on earth,” my suggested, “We have to decide whether to face reality or face facts, because so far as I know the evidence suggests otherwise,” is hardly a model of businesslike comportment.

Fun, though.

Before exploring other alternatives, there’s a larger point to make, so important that I’ve coined an acronym for it: ROT. That stands for Relationships Outlive Transactions. If you want to succeed as a business executive, make ROT a way of life.

It isn’t uncommon for IT staffers, who otherwise care passionately about the quality of engineering in their work products, to get the capitalization wrong. Faced with a design compromise insisted on by management that’s clearly second-rate engineering, some systems analysts will complain to their colleagues about politics intruding on IT design decisions. “What a bunch of rot!” they’ll exclaim, when they should comment, more understandingly, “What a bunch of ROT.”

Relationships are defined by mutual knowledge of each others’ subtleties of motivation, definitions of integrity, congruence of goals, and overall chemistry. Relationships create trust and an ability to cooperate. They lubricate the conduct of day-to-day business. Relationships outlive transactions — the individual decisions and compromises that go into the won and lost columns of life.

It’s rare that winning a single transaction is worth causing a good working relationship to decay, although it can happen. That’s why an ability to compromise is so important in the executive suite: Without it, an executive will, in winning one battle, use tactics that alienate peers to the extent they’ll be on the other side of all subsequent battles.

At IT Catalysts our business change management consulting methodology starts with a stakeholder analysis — an attempt to determine who is likely to resist whatever change is being planned, why, and what to do about it. Among the more common strategies for dealing with change resisters are firing them, marginalizing them, and co-opting them. Of these three, co-option is, when possible, the superior alternative, for two reasons. The first is that apostasy is powerfully persuasive for everyone else. For those who also have opposed whatever it is, a public apostate makes it okay for them to change their minds as well if they’re at all tempted to do so. It helps mold opinion as you want it shaped.

The other reason, relevant to the subject of reality and who owns it, is that when you co-opt a resister you build or strengthen a working relationship, turning an opponent on one issue into a likely ally on the next issue.

How does this fit the subject? Imagine you’re on the receiving end of another executive saying you have to face reality. If you respond as I’d suggested in the last column, you might win your point, but you’ll do so by publicly embarrassing your opponent. That fosters resentment, which can fester, coming back to haunt you next time the two of you are at odds.

That isn’t always a bad thing. If the individual in question already has you in the cross-hairs and has decided you’re going to be an opponent, your only two choices are to win or to lose. As a general rule, winning is better.

But if the other person is also a ROTter (or can be turned into one), you’re far better off choosing a course of action designed to win everyone over, including Mr. or Ms. Reality.

Which might mean nothing more than ignoring the offending phrase entirely, responding, “I just don’t see it that way. Here’s why.”

Or, you can play the apostasy card yourself: “I used to think that myself. Then I read a book by Bob Lewis, and I became convinced that this other way of looking at the situation works better.” (Your having helped me sell more books is just a fringe benefit.)

The apostasy gambit is just as persuasive when you’re the apostate as when you co-opt an opponent. Even better, it promotes your goal of making the whole ROTten company work better.