Get Ready To Rumble

GET READY TO RUMBLE
by
William Cottringer

There are plenty of dismal headlines in the business and public service news today. “Financial Meltdown,” “Profitability Plague” “Cooked Books ,” and “Ethics Erosion” are common phrases today. Are these things just part of a bigger problem?

One of the most valuable skills a leader can have is the sensitivity to moments of danger vs. opportunity. This sensitivity is a part of the ability to separate symptoms from core problems. The symptoms we are seeing from the flames of corporate America are just a diversion from what is really going on.

Did we really think we could make a major transformation into the Information Age and shift paradigms from traditional, hierarchical, and controlling bureaucracies to virtual, experimental, flattened, empowering, and free-floating organizations without some very serious consequences? Changing values such as divergent thinking, empowerment , discretion, ingenuity, diversity, and responsible freedom, all have consequences just like their more traditional counterparts do.

The lesson we should learn from the present transformation and paradigm shifting that we are going through, is the wisdom of balance. We can’t exchange one whole set of paradigms and values on the left for another different set on the right in a wholesale fashion, without some dire, adverse consequences. It is the thoughtful blending of the two extremes that creates real progress.

Here are a few of the internal shifts that are presenting new problems in organizations which require a balanced leadership response to quell the noisy and disruptive rumbling. Without such a careful response the rumbling may become destructive before we realize it. Times are unsettling and solid leadership anchors are sorely needed.

CONVERGENT THINKING VS. DIVERGENT THINKING

According to intelligence theorists such as Robert Sternberg, the successful thinking that is needed today is a blending of logic, creativity and common sense. The challenge for leaders is to teach others how to achieve this blend of successful thinking by demonstrating these three different mental skills themselves for everyone to see. The difficulty is in letting go of learning expectations—it takes great patience to avoid over-focusing on the consequences of inevitable mistakes that people will make in trying to improve the quality of their thinking. It will take a lot of practice and hard work to get it right. That starts with resolve to embrace the current mantra of “what got us here won’t get us there.”

BELIEFS VS. PRINCIPLES

If knowledge workers are going to be fully productive and successful in the Information Age, they will have to trade in their obsolete, rusty truth compasses for shiny new ones. Unverified assumptions and emotionally-based beliefs must to be replaced with practical principles and universal, natural laws that are proven and evidenced-based. The difficulty here is that people quickly adopt wrong beliefs and then those beliefs become almost impervious to change, regardless of compelling evidence to the contrary. Effective leaders need to demonstrate the level of self-confidence and mental flexibility that it takes to openly question their own faulty beliefs and replace them with tried and true principles.

EXTERNAL MOTIVATION VS. INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

Employees will always need to be encouraged to perform better with the promise of external rewards such as personal acknowledgment, public recognition, and financial incentives. But, some of the important cognitive skills we are expecting employees to learn and practice today can only come about by intrinsic motivation —wanting to do something just because it feels satisfying to do in and by itself. The knowledge workers of today need jobs that afford significant meaning, real responsibility, customized uniqueness, a sense of making a contribution, flexible autonomy and multiple choices. These things provide both external and internal motivation .

FINDING ANSWERS VS. ASKING QUESTIONS

We will always need good answers to perplexing problems, but it might be time to start questioning the productivity and sequence of spending so much energy on seeking clever answers as opposed to asking smarter questions. For example, we might want to stop looking for clever ways to re-institute older values in the workplace, and take the time to start questioning why we are resisting the newer values that are surfacing and learn how to adopt, assimilate, adapt to and leverage these things for better outcomes. One of the best two questions anyone can ask is “Why?” and “Why not?” How will always follow when you ask the right question.

TALKING VS. LISTENING

You could make a strong case for leaders taking an active talking role in two parts of any work conversation—the beginning and the end—and doing all the listening in between. In the beginning, the leader can describe the vision of where the organization is going, explain what the expectations are for employees, and share a few hints about how to be successful. At the end, the leader can follow Max DePree’s advice and say “thank you” for making the vision a reality. Maybe the middle part of the conversation is what empowerment is all about. But that is very risky—needing certainty in a very uncertain world.

OUTER DIRECTED VS. INNER-DIRECTED

For people to reach their full potential and be as productive as they can be, they must move from an outward focus of control to an inner-directed one—paying less attention to what others expect and say, and more from what they know by their own experience and thinking. To encourage this transition, leaders must create situations that can build such autonomy without having too many undesirable side effects. The difficulty is that such a transition requires skills such as critical thinking, creativity , intrinsic motivation and good listening, which may have to be taught first. And then too, leaders can no longer expect followers to follow obsolete management strategies of ‘what got me here’ to ‘what will get us all there.’ Such a major paradigm thinking shift may need the Big kahuna/Tsunami to seep us there.

In a sense, we are all headed towards uncharted waters where we have to learn and improve by sharing our pieces of the map and working together as a team. Leaders have the challenge of orchestrating all this with their balanced leadership abilities to minimize the rumbling by working towards the golden mean of approaches. They can do this best by gradually emptying their toolboxes to get to the essential stuff—the reality repair Rx tools. These basic four tools are (1) seeing how things really are (2) not getting overwhelmed or panicky about all that needs to be done (3) focusing on doing the few things that matter most to get the best results, with the least bad side-effects (4) letting go to the inescapable need to be a perpetual learner, changer and adapter.