Over the years, I have met many individuals who achieved a high degree of outward success, and yet they have an inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and for healthy relationships with other people. Some of the problems they have shared with me may be familiar to you:
"I've met my career goals and achieved professional success. But it has cost me my personal and family life. I don't know my wife and children any more. I'm not even sure I know myself and what's really important to me."
"I expect a lot from my employees, and I work hard to be friendly and fair toward them. But I don't feel any loyalty from them. I think if I were sick for a day, they'd spend most of their time gabbing at the water fountain. Why can't they be responsible?"
"There's much to do, and there's never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled all day, every day. I've tried different planning systems. They've helped some, but I don't feel I'm living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live."
"I'm busy - really busy. But I wonder if what I'm doing will make any difference in the long run. I'd like to think there was meaning to my life, that my contributions made a difference."
"I have a forceful personality. In almost any interaction, I can control the outcome, even influence others to come up with the solution I want. But I feel uneasy. I always wonder what other people really think of me and my ideas."
These are deep problems, painful problems that quick fix approaches can't solve.
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics to get other people 14314y2415o to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do will be seen as manipulative. Rhetoric and good intentions aside, if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success.
Our effectiveness is predicated upon certain inviolate principles - natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension. These principles are woven into the fabric of every civilized society and comprise the roots of every family and institution that has endured and prospered.
The reality of such principles or natural laws becomes obvious to anyone who examines the cycles of social history. These principles surface time and time again, and the degree to which people recognize and live in harmony with them moves them toward either survival and stability or disintegration and destruction.
These principles are self-evident and self-validating: it's as if they are part of the human condition, consciousness and conscience. For example, consider the principle of fairness, from which our ideas of equity and justice develop. Children have an innate sense of fairness, apart from their conditioning. Definitions and applications will vary, but there is universal awareness of the principle. Other examples would include integrity and honesty, the foundation of trust which is essential to cooperation and long-term personal and interpersonal growth.
I find that long-term thinking executives are turned off by "motivational" speakers who have nothing more to share than entertaining stories mingled with platitudes. They want substance; they want process. They want more than aspirin and band-aids. They want to solve the chronic problems and focus on the principles that bring long-term results.
Key to Enduring Results
Albert Einstein observed: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
As we look around us and within us, we realize that the deep, fundamental problems we face cannot be solved on the superficial level on which they were created. We need a new level of thinking based on principles of effective management to solve these deep concerns. We need a principle-centered, character-based, "inside-out" approach.
Inside-out means to start first with self - to start with the most inside part of self - with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. So, if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, helpful, contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of public recognition, focus first on primary greatness of character.
The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. Inside-out is a continuing process of renewal, an upward spiral of growth that leads to progressively higher forms of responsible independence and effective interdependence.
In all of my experience, I have never seen lasting solutions to problems, lasting happiness and success, come from the outside in. Outside-in approaches result in unhappy people who feel victimized and immobilized, who focus on the weaknesses of other people and the circumstances they feel are responsible for their own stagnant situation. I've seen unhappy marriages where each spouse wants the other to change, where each is confessing the other's "sins," where each is trying to shape up the other. I've seen labor management disputes where people spend tremendous amounts of time and energy trying to create legislation that would force people to act as if trust were really there.
The primary source of continuing problems in many companies and cultures has been the dominant social paradigm of outside-in. Everyone is convinced that the problem is "out there" and if "they" (others) would "shape up" or suddenly "ship out" of existence, the problem would be solved.
The principles of effectiveness are deeply scripted within us, in our conscience and in our quiet reflection on life experience. To recognize and develop them and to use them in meeting our deepest concerns, we need to think differently, to shift our paradigms to a new, deeper, "inside-out" level.
Four-Part Approach
The inside-out approach is on four levels. Each one is necessary but insufficient - executives must function well at all four levels with all four principles.
1. Personal: Trustworthiness. There are two components of trustworthiness, and they are inseparably tied together: 1) the first is the foundation of Character or personal integrity, including principle-centered leadership; 2) the second is our skills, our competence. Too often we think trust is only a function of integrity. It is also a function of competence evergreen, ever-growing competence. Character and competence comprise our trustworthiness - it's what we are and "What you are shouts so loudly in my ears, I can't hear what you say."
2. Interpersonal: Trust. Only trustworthiness will produce trust. You might have a medical doctor with great character, but if he is incompetent, you won't have trust. Or if you have a highly competent surgeon who lacks integrity, you may have an operation that isn't necessary.
3. Managerial: Empowerment. You can't have empowerment without first having trust. Because if you don't trust the people you are working with, then you must use control rather than empowerment. If you do trust them and have performance agreements with them, you can work toward empowerment.
4. Organizational: Alignment. Structure and systems must reinforce the empowerment concept. In aligned organizations, everything serves to help the individual be productive and effective in meeting the objectives of the win-win performance agreement. If there is misalignment of structure and systems, you will not have empowerment or trust.
Working at one, two or three levels is necessary but insufficient. For example, if you work only at the personal level, you might join an encounter group or attend a personal development seminar, but you will likely revert to old behavior once back into the work place. If you work only at the interpersonal level, you will do team building or take people into the wilderness or improve communications skills. But you get disappointing results. And if you focus only on the managerial level and train people in delegation and participative management without building trust, the training simply won't take - you will soon go back to benevolent authoritarianism.
In my seminars, I often ask managers, "How many of you have been trained in empowerment or participative management?" Most everybody raises their hands. Then I ask, "And what happens when you try to empower people when there is no trust?" They all say, "It just doesn't work. You have to go back to a hard MBO approach or some other control approach to keep some semblance of order in the work environment."
Then I ask them, "Why continue to focus then on management training? You give the illusion of solving the problem when you're just treating the symptoms - you may get temporary relief from acute pain but you aren't treating the chronic problem."
And then I ask about the organizational level: "How many of you see the big solution is to get reorganized, to get alignment." Half raise their hands. "How many see the big solution is to redo the systems?" One-third raise their hands. Then I ask, "What are the consequences of working at those levels when you haven't worked at the personal and interpersonal levels?" And the answer: "Disaster."
The consensus is that we're working with an ecosystem, a whole environment. And if you approach a problem with something other than principle-centered leadership on all four levels, your efforts will be "necessary but insufficient."
Fix the Six Percent First
One of W. Edwards Deming's key insights is that 94 percent of the problems in organizations are general problems (bad systems) only 6 percent are specific problems (bad people).
Many managers misinterpret such data. The flaw in their thinking is in supposing that if they then correct the structure and systems (programs), the problems with people (programmers) go away. The reverse is actually true - if you correct the 6 percent first, the other problems will largely go away.
Unless you work on the 6 percent in significant ways, you can't work on the 94 percent in significant ways, only in cosmetic ways. And you will soon revert back to old ways.
Why? Because people are the programmers, and they use systems and structure as the outward expressions of their own character and competence. Strategy, structure and systems are the "software" programs written by your programmers, your people.
If owners and managers lack character and competence, they won't give power and profit and recognition to others. If they do, they feel that they are at risk personally. They must use the inside-out approach and first work on character and competence to build trust so that they can have empowerment then they can solve 94 percent of the problems (bad structure and systems).
Until individual managers have done the inside-out work, they won't solve the fundamental problems of the organization, nor will they truly empower others, even though they might use the language of empowerment. Their personality and character will manifest itself eventually.
We must work on character and competence to solve structural and systemic problems. Remember: work first on the programmer if you want to improve the program. People produce the strategy, structure, systems and styles of the organization. These are the arms and hands of the minds and hearts of people.
|
