All Posts in Leadership

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Leadership has a different meaning today.

Before September 11th, leadership meant painting a compelling vision of the future, setting clear goals, and motivating employees.

Today, it means instilling employees with the courage required to show up for work.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th are horrifying and despicable. In a world that allows both terrorism and the conditions that breed it to exist, they were also inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is how we respond to these and future attacks.

With luck, we’ll learn from history. We also suffered from a sneak attack in World War II, and with luck that war taught us some important lessons. We learned, for example, that while a whole people is never evil, a whole people can be moved to act evilly by evil leaders. We also learned that the only defense against suicidal attackers is to eliminate those who direct their attacks.

We may have even learned that the most effective response to attack is not to discriminate against those of our own citizens who share ethnicity with our attackers, neither before we’re certain who directed the attacks nor after we’ve identified them. In World War II we sequestered honest Japanese citizens. If it turns out these attacks were the work of Arab terrorists, we must not repeat this mistake.

In World War II we also learned that America’s strongest weapon is its economic strength and its culture. We beat the Japanese, not because our armed forces were more courageous or better led. The Japanese forces, whatever we may think of them in other respects, fought courageously and were a tenacious foe. We beat the Japanese with our economy and a culture that rewards merit, not inherited aristocracy or ethnic affinity. That’s something we must never forget.

As a business leader you aren’t a mere spectator. Those who report to you need leadership right now and will respond to it. Right now they’re susceptible to both fear and bigotry. Fear will harm our economy and bigotry will harm our culture, which is exactly what the terrorists who attacked us want. You have a role in defusing these issues before they become unmanageable.

Most of all, it’s up to you as a leader to remind those who look to you for leadership of the most important issue in any conflict: Be careful who you choose as enemies, because you’re likely to become just like them.

If our response to terrorism is to take on some of the characteristics of the terrorists themselves, then they will have won.

Comments

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I’ve figured out the difference between scientific knowledge and business knowledge. Scientific knowledge depends on facts, logic, and the rigorous testing of ideas in the laboratory and field. Business knowledge depends on the assertion of pet biases with great confidence and exorbitant billing rates.

For example …

By now I’ve read or listened to at least a dozen authorities in the field of managing organizational change. Most begin by explaining that resistance to change is wired into the human brain, natural and instinctive, the result of millions of years of evolution.

As it happens, my graduate studies were in the field of sociobiology, so I’m confident I know more than these “experts” about what is and isn’t hardwired into the human brain. Yes, there is some hard wiring in the human brain. For example, the ability to learn language is a native capability. Bipedal walking is another piece of standard equipment, although the ability to simultaneously chew gum must be learned.

So there is some hard wiring. Not a lot, but some. But no, resistance to change isn’t any of it, nor do people (at least, not those raised in Western cultures; I’m insufficiently knowledgeable about the rest to speak with confidence) resist all change as a matter of learned behavior either.

Want proof? Here’s a simple experiment you can perform in the privacy of your own organization. Offer your employees an upgrade to a piece of core technology they use every day: Buy them a new car of their choosing. You’ll pay for the gas, insurance, maintenance and repairs, and there are no strings attached.

How many employees do you really think will resist this change?

Few people automatically resist change. What’s most commonly mistaken for resistance to change is something quite different: Fear of the unknown.

Most people do fear the unknown. The nature vs nurture question notwithstanding, it’s easy to understand why the unknown is to be feared. Whether you imagine a Toe Monster lurking under your bed, a crazed mugger lurking in some dark alley, or layoffs lurking under the current process re-engineering effort in your company, the possible risks of the unknown — death, destruction and unemployment — outweigh the possible benefits.

Which is why the most useful tools in any change leader’s toolkit are the “Three C’s”: Communication, communication, and yet more communication.

That’s what’s required to change the unknown into the known. If the known is a new car, so much the better. If not, at least employees know the worst that can happen, which is always better than the worst they can imagine.

Comments