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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I never read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (I bought the discounted version: Four Habits of Semi-Effective People). People I respect have good things to say about Covey. While I can no more remember all seven habits than all seven dwarves, all fourteen (habits and dwarves) seemed both useful and unthreatening when I first encountered them.

Covey has another book, Principle Centered Leadership. I don’t go in much for this kind of book, because its central thesis – that adherence to ethical principles is a prerequisite to leadership – seems more the stuff of pamphlets than of treatises. Still, I have no argument with Covey, who promotes old-fashioned virtues in eloquent fashion. Virtues are Good Things (to use the technical term).

I do, however, take issue with the people who heard about Covey and, harking back to Jordy LaForge, thought, “Being ethical can advance my career? You know, it’s crazy enough, it just might work!”

Here’s an opinion: It’s not ethics until it hurts. If you’re not taking a personal risk, not sticking your neck out, then you’re not sticking to your principles. You’re just enjoying a string of good luck.

The sorriest facet of this whole phenomenon is how it turned ethics and principles into management fads. Empowerment, which certainly has an ethical dimension, became a fad as well. The experts told us all to empower employees because of how much more profitable it would make our businesses. Regrettably, accounting systems have no way to determine whether empowerment creates profitability, so the fad has started to wane.

Here’s a different perspective: you have no choice but to empower your employees. They already have the power to wreck your organization, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Employees can respond to requests for help with indifference, inflexibly quote policy in response to service problems, produce the minimum defined in your performance standards, and live down to your carefully crafted job descriptions. So long as they do their jobs as you’ve defined them your employees are safe, until the whole ship of your organization sinks to the bottom.

None of the tools available to managers can stop this kind of empowerment – not procedure manuals, job descriptions, performance reviews, or disciplinary processes. The more you try to keep employees from messing up, the more you make their failure inevitable, until the whole situation becomes completely ridiculous.

Don’t believe me? Look at the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and Federal Acquisition Requirement Specifications (FARS). These two sets of documents detail how the government must buy information technology. FIPS and FARS try to make the process idiot-proof. Great theory. The paradox? FIPS and FARS are so detailed and elaborate that to learn them you have to be smart enough to not need them in the first place.

Empowerment is a good-news-bad-news proposition. The bad news: You have no choice about empowering your employees. You can’t prevent their wrecking your things. The good news: you can successfully structure your work environment so employees help your organization thrive.

The better news: it’s a whole lot simpler this way. Specifying goals and principles is much easier than dictating behavior. With few exceptions, employees want to succeed. If you’d only tell them what that means … how you define success … they’ll help you get there. They may not do things the way you’d do them, but that’s okay. Different golf pros have different swings, but they all hit the ball very well (and much better than I do).

Far too often, empowerment became a numbers game. Cost-justified by decreasing the manager/worker ratio, empowerment programs reduced interaction between managers and staff. Mistake. The point is to change how they interact, not to reduce the amount of contact.

At its simplest and most profound level, empowerment is about a change in perspective. Managers who don’t believe in empowering their workforce try to keep employees from failing.

Empowering managers help their employees succeed.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Bob Markman, a talented financial advisor of my acquaintance sees Japan entering a lengthy period of decline. His logic: China will become an economic superpower and the other “Tiger” nations will continue to thrive. Since the rest of Asia has long memories, Japan’s actions before and during World War II will lead to the rest of Asia excluding it from joint ventures and regional development efforts.

Time and the global economy will reveal Markman’s ability to prognosticate. I thought of his analysis after reading that both CompuServe and America On Line initially chose to deal with Netscape, largely spurning Microsoft. Not very long ago, Microsoft announced its entry into the on-line services business, describing cut-throat pricing and bundled interface software. This led to jitters throughout the on-line services industry, and a great quote from Steven Case of AOL: “Tell Bill Gates this will be his Vietnam!”

I thought of Markman’s analysis again now that both CompuServe and AOL have signed deals with Microsoft. It appears America On Line follows the lead of America On Earth, which counts Japan and Germany among its close allies.

Some of us admire Microsoft’s aggressive business practices, others decry them. Regardless, I wonder if it will find itself in the position Markman predicts for Japan: will companies base future alliances on the memory of Microsoft’s past tactics, or will they follow the American model, pragmatically allying with former enemies?

The same issues apply on an individual level – to you and your business relationships, which usually follow the Asian model. Adversarial relationships can last a long time.
People care deeply about the programs they sponsor and adopt. People view projects, programs, vendors … stuff they’ve bought into … the way they think of their pets (hence “pet project”) or maybe their children. They … we … become personally involved, and sometimes lose perspective completely.

In the heat of the moment it’s easy to focus on winning this one issue, losing track of the larger context in which you’re operating. When you choose tactics to win that damage your relationships in the organization, you’ve reduced your ability to win the next point. Eventually, the process of winning will result in your complete inability to function, and you’ll have to move on to the next jungle, where you can start your practice of slash-and-burn agriculture all over again.

So here’s some practical advice: choose antagonistic relationships (the word “enemy” is so melodramatic!) carefully.

Whenever you’re trying to make a point, win an argument, sell a program, or whatever, you’ll encounter resistance from one quarter or another. I suggest the following 5-step approach:

1. Take a deep breath and decide how important it is to you. Is it worth your full effort, or does it make more sense to simply make your case and live with whatever decision happens?

2. Exploit your relationships with key decision-makers, guiding them to the “right” perspective, which is to say, yours. If you haven’t built strong relationships yet, get going. They’re more important than all the logic you can muster.

3. Build a relationship with those taking the opposite side. Try to win them over, if not to your opinion than to understanding you’re taking a legitimate, professional position. Create mutual respect.

4. Find something to create the appearance of a compromise – something to give your adversaries in the process. In other words, make it look like both sides win … to your adversaries, not just to outside parties.

5. Don’t be a sore loser. If it doesn’t go your way, don’t walk away grumbling about office politics and plotting your revenge. This is an opportunity to show some class. Take advantage of it. Buy the winner lunch and figure out how you can jointly sponsor the next program.

And how should you deal with your adversaries in the future? Opinion: holding grudges is a mistake. Forgetting character is an even bigger mistake.

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