Current Trends, Hard Simplicity

As scarce as truth is, the supply is always greater than the demand.
Josh Billings

Where should we look this year for a fresh approach to developing leadership and management competence? Which of the old gurus are still relevant? How do the new writers and consultants stack up? Are the best current developments US- or EU-based? Do the fundamentals of successful practices lie in suggestion boxes, developing emotional intelligence or discovering who moved my cheese? Should our people take MBA programmes, get coached or visit the Dalai Lama?

Given the extent of research into these topics, it's surprising how many organisations, relationships and individuals within them, function pretty much as they did 5, 10 or 35 years ago: they survive rather than thrive.

Theorists disagree about causes and remedies but unite on the need to continue their research and publishing, adding to the existing plethora of conflicting approaches, mismatching "key principles" and "essential steps".

The phenomenon invites the conclusion that it might be best to stop reading this stuff. Confusion or hindrance is just a book away.

Sure, as we learn more about how people function and what successful collaboration with others requires, we may get incrementally better at it. And there's plenty of evidence of need: sluggish organisations and the sloppy practices of those who lead and manage them. But there is a great deal more theorising than progress. "Breakthroughs" abound and the promise is always alluring. Pity it's so hollow.

Why are there so many bestsellers each claiming their originality and correctness and why do most of them seem, as Mark Twain put it, like "chloroform in print"?

One obvious reason for the ideas glut is, (as Simon Caulkin writing in The Observer, suggests), the connection between blockbusters and the "management ideas industry". Academia and consultancies become closed-loop publishing markets, both writing and then using the books as a means of demonstrating "thought leadership". They are at once the medium and the message.

The soporific effects of these publications arises because at some level we already know what is important and suspect that the search for simple magic or silver bullets is pointless. We realise the theories are a either dressing-up or mystification of some basics we should practise but often do not, or that they miss the point by focusing on sexy nice-to-haves while overlooking the less attractive fundamentals. The choice seems to be between earnest and thorough yet boring on the one hand, and exciting, promising and ultimately irrelevant on the other. For an illustration of the former, try this:

An extensive Workplace Productivity study completed in November 2004 found that improved productivity lies not in working harder but about working smarter! Really! I'm not inventing this - you can find the report at www.dol.govt.nz/Productivity/report/index.asp. Its summary alone is 44 pages and will challenge even the most determined insomniac. Don't get me started on how many people were involved, how much they travelled, consulted, work-shopped, focused-grouped and drafted; nor on how much this might have cost the New Zealand taxpayers who funded it all. The report identified seven key drivers for lifting workplace productivity:

• Building leadership and management capability.
• Encouraging innovation and technology.
• Creating productive workplaces
• Investing in people and skills.
• Sharing ideas.
• Measuring what works.

Of its 67 recommendations, 28 were for further review, research, identification, assessment, evaluation, exploration, review or examination. No kidding!

Well, duh! I mean, fair crack at the sauce bottle, hasn't this very advice been common sense and widely understood to be uncommon practice since, like forever? What could possibly justify further research?

Anyway, how do we know these people are right? One fundamental (but thoroughly mistaken) idea that drives our culture is the concept of the One Right Way: there can't possibly be a number of good ways of doing something, there has to be a right way, with all the others ways wrong. Can we be sure someone has found the truth? If not, then who has it?

Managers must decide for themselves, as Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer has noted, whether they will be swept up in the fads and rhetoric of the moment or will recognise some basic principles of management and the data consistent with them. Therein lie two difficulties: (1) Too many of us have become reliant on someone else making these choices for us. In the process we seem to have lost the ability to recognise simple truths. (2) "Basic" is not necessarily easy, may be hard to achieve and therefore avoided. "Simplicity", as one author begins his book on the subject, "can be difficult".

Bestsellers do so well, largely because of our learned helplessness, learning laziness and consequent distrust of our own instincts. Acquired from conventional education and socialisation processes, these habits cause such incompetence in inner-directedness and passivity in self-monitoring and self-assessment that we've become dependent on being shown the Right Way. Although we could be, we are usually not experts on ourselves and our own situations. Conditioned to relinquish leadership over our own development and to rely more on others' advice than on distilling wisdom from our personal experience, we are unused to recognising common sense and don't know how to make it common practice. Even when offered a useful principle or a concept with possibilities, we say, "Yes, but how do you make it work?"

Someone else's sure-fire magic is more attractive, (particularly if it includes an up-market or out-of-town seminar, preferably both), precisely because it promises to by-pass the hard work demanded by real progress: the challenge of changing our habits. As Sheldon Kopp famously put it, most people don't want to change and most of those who say that they do, don't want to really. They just want to be helped to stay exactly as they are, to become happier neurotics.

We do not blunder or get confused because the truth is hard to see. What ought to be common sense is visible at a glance. (Asked how his theory of relativity was discovered, Einstein explained, "I thought about how the universe ought to be, and it was.") We allow ourselves to be overly-influenced by others because it is more convenient. This paves the way for what was once known as management by bandwagon. "Keep your head down and it'll go away", is what staff understand amongst themselves. They know the current fad will soon be replaced by the next without significant change.

Unless we learn to study our own experience it passes through our intellectual systems, as Saul Alinksy said, as segmented happenings and separate events: we have the experience but miss the meaning.

What meaning . . ? If we more often sought wisdom (laws of action and principles of change) in our own experiences and the observable experience of others; if we recognised and carefully monitored the impact of behaviours we role model for others; if we were less improvisational about our leadership and management practices and applied the first fundamental of a methodical approach (systematically monitor and measure the impact of your plans and actions), we'd more often get the point(s):

• The secret is that there is no secret or magic. The rudiments of successful collaboration in organisations and enterprises have already been discovered and are still insufficiently applied.
• These commonsense activities, when methodically practised, tend to improve the quality of leadership and management and therefore the results dependent on them
• New developments may add benefits but only if the prerequisites are already in place.
• Leadership and management practices are usually overly-focused on the organisation's primary task and insufficiently on developing individual and collective capacity for the primary task.
• Generally, improvisation rules in the practice of leadership and management.
• The main reason things don't go "according to plan" is that there isn't a well-planned plan.
• Plans whose real purpose, priorities and intended outcomes are unknown or indistinct cannot be effectively implemented.
• When plans are not sufficiently monitored, refined and evaluated, unbridgeable gaps tend to form between the ideal and the reality.
• Plans made without the involvement of those affected by them, attract distrust, apathy and cynicism.
• Managers and leaders often fail to set plans for the development of their own leadership and management practices. They usually fail to sufficiently measure their impact on the people they are paid to serve.
• Best interpersonal-relationship management practices are most required when they are most difficult. At those times we can use only the behaviours we habituate every day. These are usually inadequate for demanding situations.
• Democratic collaboration and hierarchical organisation are two opposing ideas. To succeed, hierarchical organisations must manage this conflict.

Well, that's my theory and my book will be out soon. Just kidding; much of my advice is freely available from the website www.encouragementors.com and complementary ezine, Encouraging Progress. Check out the Survey of Constructive Influence - a way of monitoring your management and leadership behaviours. That's not free but it is inexpensive and you'll recognise the simple common sense on which it's based.

© Copyright 2002 - 2007 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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