Rectifications (12) – The Usual Suspects…
Torrey Orton – July 1, 2009
… is the name of a film (1994) which a patient client was telling me about in the middle of searching his own script a few days ago. I jumped for my notepad because I’d been looking for the next needed Rectification. I know one when I see one because my favourites abound, but only a few are chosen. This is one. Not the film of course, which I gather from reviews and his recollection is a must for those among the unchosen.
Apart from the film, ‘the usual suspects’ enjoys an ubiquity among the commentariats and letterati which is saddening. So quickly, in a turn of the phrase, the writers relieve themselves of any need to think about their argument. It is no longer argument since it addresses part of the prospective audiences as noteworthy only by their dismissal. Pathetic. But this fault is not only to be found here or on just one side of socio-political discourses.
Its underpinning is a failure of intellectual competence, or better, of intellectual and moral development beyond that of the black and white universe of early adulthood. The Harvard Business School provides a nice example of this. In “How Frank or Deceptive Should Leaders Be?” the argument flows back and forth between the two with nary a thought given to the probability that both are required in many circumstances – quite likely in all human ones. Such digital thinking, either/or thinking leads to simplicities which cannot sustain complexity. The roles of frankness and deception in everyday life (to say nothing of their roles in high speed, high stakes decision-making) are open to encyclopaedic dispute. Accepting that they both have a role is the starting place for a more radical discussion.
If the digital is the level of thought of world class (?) CEO’s and aspirant-CEO’s in the US (and therefore, since at HBS, the world) it is not surprising they get caught in conceptual and procedural pits, inflexible in the face of normal complexity. What’s the training they offer for this gap? I think an education may be required, but most universities don’t offer that anymore. It probably can’t be trained anyway, though a multitude of leadership specialists will offer it in a week or two’s workshops and projects and someone is buying their wares so…maybe it can!
Finally, talking to Brassie today, I realised that ‘the usual suspects’ is a kind of profiling which, if it were conducted by our various social services, would be grounds for a discrimination complaint or more. Since it is only intellectual profiling of figureheads in our fantasy demonologies let it be.
,
As a last gasp, if you feel a ‘usual suspects’ coming on, take a breath, wonder why you are preparing to attach this label to the people in question, and ask yourself what your thought or action gains by so labelling them. I bet it’s some kind of ethical free pass for you from the pain of thinking through a complexity. It usually is for me.
Showing posts with label leadership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leadership. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Dance of difference(s) – 5 – Bullying leadership
Dance of difference(s) – 5 – Bullying leadership
June 21, 2009
Torrey Orton
When we are trying, as my colleagues at Diversity@work honourably and persistently do, to promote inclusion and confront distractions and manipulations like bullying, we encounter some contradictions deep in our socio-political systems. I honour their persistence and focus by writing what follows, though it may seem I am undermining them. In a recent Just the Facts Diversity Update (June 11, 2009) Mark Heaysman wrote:
In summary, as demonstrated by many workplace surveys, bullying is alive and definitely in the workplaces. To address bullying we need to truly accept it is happening and not allow obvious or subtle acts of bullying to be ignored. The consequences are serious and totally unacceptable.
It takes a comprehensive and strategic approach to understand your landscape, the issues that are around, the policies that are required, the education required, the organisational culture in place, what needs to change, and the rewards for a non bullying environment. As part of any strategic approach to a diverse and inclusive environment bullying must be understood and addressed, not in isolation but as part of a total approach to inclusiveness.
Bullying is us?
For example, you can’t go further than the House of Reps for a well rounded demonstration of public bullying. Try Question Time on the ABC (twice daily when in session). For free you can see varying qualities of: name-calling, personal invective, screaming matches, guilt by association, passive-aggressive demeaning, public shaming, talking over the other, pointed interjections (point of order?), leading questions, trap questions - the whole range of classic bullying behaviours (see here for a representative sample in question format for a quick self-test). But I have to credit our pollies for not going to the lengths of the Taiwan Legislative Yuan, for example, where a good quarterly punch-up seems expected to mark a serious difference, or create one where there wasn’t enough difference.
What you can’t see so easily are the behaviours of role power; mostly just personal power is visible. For the former we have to go into the Caucus or Cabinet room…or listen to the occasional “shuffling” of chair holders. Or try Tim Colebatch’s acceptable face and hidden face of Peter Costello’s influencing in THEAGE. The acceptable is “the swagger of self-confidence, the master of the wounding jibe” and the hidden “he was also incurably vain and bullying”.
If you are 5 years old, 10, 20 or 50, you will get a good impression of what’s expected of our leaders from this mob. The fact that a “good performer” in the House of Reps is assessed by quality commentators like Colebatch to be a master of bullying (Colebatch’s acceptable face of Costello above) couldn’t hurt that impression. Bully to bullying.
Bully role models?
So why start with known bad actors? First, we can find their siblings elsewhere – in footy teams, board rooms, executive suites, local councils. The rest don’t get as much consistently public air time. With the House of Reps we can’t miss that this is really how they act normally. And this is what we expect of our leaders. So, bullying we get.
Second, we keep getting it because the ‘clubs’ to which the star performers belong – among others, the governing, sporting, commercial, professional (don’t forget bullying by the second-most educated groups in our culture: lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants) – are mini-societies whose members’ prime identity and membership reference points are their peers, as they should be.
Trouble is, when perceived mud comes slinging towards a peer mate, the first reactions of the others is defence of the assaulted. This is probably because they know they may be next in the line, for similar grievances. So, a good offense (disregard supported by denial) is a spontaneous action. As such groupings get ever further from accountabilities to others, the defence gets stronger, and more impervious.
Similar patterns can be found in the protection of the rabid ends of religions’ spectra. All the monotheisms contain egregious fundamentalist sects their mainstreams will not disown. They are closer to each other than to their mainstreams in terms of the thought and feeling structures of their activities. It is hard to disown family.
Leading and bullyship
As for leadership and bullying, the case is already in. Many leadership behaviours fall easily into the bullying frame. Most of the leadership professors and consultants pretty much assure us that leading in any area of life from backyard maintenance to multi-national finance requires capacities like focus’, single-minded attention to detail, absolute commitment to quality and customer service…and so on. All these are creatures of the human capacity for obsessiveness. These apply as much to the intellectual, artistic and spiritual domains as to business or politics.
So, when a ‘leader’ is in the grip of their domain, they are likely to display such capacities in abundance. Notice that, displayed in abundance, they are very likely, especially under pressure, to look and feel a lot like bullying – they will be bull-dozing, pile-driving, persistent, demanding…do I hear bullying coming on? They may be somewhere on the behavioural spectrum from passive to aggressive, with assertive in the middle. Remember that there’s a serious component of perception to what’s felt as bullying (or love or liking, or any of the foundational relationship feelings).
In my first blog on difference four months ago I wrote:
We are entering more dangerous times for difference. As many threats, and a few promises, assail us, our room for response contracts. This will lead to uses of difference (stereotyping, demonising, etc.) which make normal engagements with difference unmanageable, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of difference’s distastefulness and, eventually, punishment worthiness.
This seems to me to still be the global situation for difference, perhaps more or less so a bit since then. My concern is that bullying, one of the many forces arising in difference, is often presented context free. This context is disclosed by questions like: ‘what sustains bullying in our lives? what are its roots and from what part(s) of the human condition does it arise?’
Hence, my effort above to note the persistence of bullying across all manner of human lives. May it open some perspectives. I do know that not having them in the picture results in the compartmentalising of the challenge of diversity and bullying as if it could be captured in a bag of behavioural purity allowing clear adjudication of complaints. Only today (21 June, ‘09) I found in The Sunday Age that an alleged member of a bullying management process accused the investigators of bullying him!! Courses will always find horses, but not always the expected race.
A good influencing prize?
So, what to do? The Hamid/Brassie obligation to provide a path to progress is always in my mind. I thought I was going to fail again, but here goes. Let’s think about this matter of reducing dysfunctional difference behaviour from a leadership perspective. Let’s get the leaders committing to changing themselves (being as how they are the main ‘role models’ setting the tone and track of organisation life). Let’s stop championing disposable, because pro-forma, attachment to fashionably virtuous actions in multi-polar people and values policies (see triple bottom lines, CSR’s, ‘our values…’ and similar which have funded lots of good printing and facilitating over the last decade).
Something like this: let Diversity@work propose a good influencing diversity and inclusion prize for major organisations in the different governance types – private, listed, NFP and government of the three levels (local, state and national). The prize would be for real (not best) efforts to undertake a bully cleansing exercise at the highest levels. It could, for example, focus on proof of competence (a set of agreed behaviours that are known to be central to influencing others) not to bully and a test period for probationary members of the elect. The influencing activity would focus on agreed public settings in which they function – corporate meetings of various sorts. A small investment by D@W would found a project to define rough parameters for such an enterprise. I look forward to hearing from them about it.
June 21, 2009
Torrey Orton
When we are trying, as my colleagues at Diversity@work honourably and persistently do, to promote inclusion and confront distractions and manipulations like bullying, we encounter some contradictions deep in our socio-political systems. I honour their persistence and focus by writing what follows, though it may seem I am undermining them. In a recent Just the Facts Diversity Update (June 11, 2009) Mark Heaysman wrote:
In summary, as demonstrated by many workplace surveys, bullying is alive and definitely in the workplaces. To address bullying we need to truly accept it is happening and not allow obvious or subtle acts of bullying to be ignored. The consequences are serious and totally unacceptable.
It takes a comprehensive and strategic approach to understand your landscape, the issues that are around, the policies that are required, the education required, the organisational culture in place, what needs to change, and the rewards for a non bullying environment. As part of any strategic approach to a diverse and inclusive environment bullying must be understood and addressed, not in isolation but as part of a total approach to inclusiveness.
Bullying is us?
For example, you can’t go further than the House of Reps for a well rounded demonstration of public bullying. Try Question Time on the ABC (twice daily when in session). For free you can see varying qualities of: name-calling, personal invective, screaming matches, guilt by association, passive-aggressive demeaning, public shaming, talking over the other, pointed interjections (point of order?), leading questions, trap questions - the whole range of classic bullying behaviours (see here for a representative sample in question format for a quick self-test). But I have to credit our pollies for not going to the lengths of the Taiwan Legislative Yuan, for example, where a good quarterly punch-up seems expected to mark a serious difference, or create one where there wasn’t enough difference.
What you can’t see so easily are the behaviours of role power; mostly just personal power is visible. For the former we have to go into the Caucus or Cabinet room…or listen to the occasional “shuffling” of chair holders. Or try Tim Colebatch’s acceptable face and hidden face of Peter Costello’s influencing in THEAGE. The acceptable is “the swagger of self-confidence, the master of the wounding jibe” and the hidden “he was also incurably vain and bullying”.
If you are 5 years old, 10, 20 or 50, you will get a good impression of what’s expected of our leaders from this mob. The fact that a “good performer” in the House of Reps is assessed by quality commentators like Colebatch to be a master of bullying (Colebatch’s acceptable face of Costello above) couldn’t hurt that impression. Bully to bullying.
Bully role models?
So why start with known bad actors? First, we can find their siblings elsewhere – in footy teams, board rooms, executive suites, local councils. The rest don’t get as much consistently public air time. With the House of Reps we can’t miss that this is really how they act normally. And this is what we expect of our leaders. So, bullying we get.
Second, we keep getting it because the ‘clubs’ to which the star performers belong – among others, the governing, sporting, commercial, professional (don’t forget bullying by the second-most educated groups in our culture: lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants) – are mini-societies whose members’ prime identity and membership reference points are their peers, as they should be.
Trouble is, when perceived mud comes slinging towards a peer mate, the first reactions of the others is defence of the assaulted. This is probably because they know they may be next in the line, for similar grievances. So, a good offense (disregard supported by denial) is a spontaneous action. As such groupings get ever further from accountabilities to others, the defence gets stronger, and more impervious.
Similar patterns can be found in the protection of the rabid ends of religions’ spectra. All the monotheisms contain egregious fundamentalist sects their mainstreams will not disown. They are closer to each other than to their mainstreams in terms of the thought and feeling structures of their activities. It is hard to disown family.
Leading and bullyship
As for leadership and bullying, the case is already in. Many leadership behaviours fall easily into the bullying frame. Most of the leadership professors and consultants pretty much assure us that leading in any area of life from backyard maintenance to multi-national finance requires capacities like focus’, single-minded attention to detail, absolute commitment to quality and customer service…and so on. All these are creatures of the human capacity for obsessiveness. These apply as much to the intellectual, artistic and spiritual domains as to business or politics.
So, when a ‘leader’ is in the grip of their domain, they are likely to display such capacities in abundance. Notice that, displayed in abundance, they are very likely, especially under pressure, to look and feel a lot like bullying – they will be bull-dozing, pile-driving, persistent, demanding…do I hear bullying coming on? They may be somewhere on the behavioural spectrum from passive to aggressive, with assertive in the middle. Remember that there’s a serious component of perception to what’s felt as bullying (or love or liking, or any of the foundational relationship feelings).
In my first blog on difference four months ago I wrote:
We are entering more dangerous times for difference. As many threats, and a few promises, assail us, our room for response contracts. This will lead to uses of difference (stereotyping, demonising, etc.) which make normal engagements with difference unmanageable, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of difference’s distastefulness and, eventually, punishment worthiness.
This seems to me to still be the global situation for difference, perhaps more or less so a bit since then. My concern is that bullying, one of the many forces arising in difference, is often presented context free. This context is disclosed by questions like: ‘what sustains bullying in our lives? what are its roots and from what part(s) of the human condition does it arise?’
Hence, my effort above to note the persistence of bullying across all manner of human lives. May it open some perspectives. I do know that not having them in the picture results in the compartmentalising of the challenge of diversity and bullying as if it could be captured in a bag of behavioural purity allowing clear adjudication of complaints. Only today (21 June, ‘09) I found in The Sunday Age that an alleged member of a bullying management process accused the investigators of bullying him!! Courses will always find horses, but not always the expected race.
A good influencing prize?
So, what to do? The Hamid/Brassie obligation to provide a path to progress is always in my mind. I thought I was going to fail again, but here goes. Let’s think about this matter of reducing dysfunctional difference behaviour from a leadership perspective. Let’s get the leaders committing to changing themselves (being as how they are the main ‘role models’ setting the tone and track of organisation life). Let’s stop championing disposable, because pro-forma, attachment to fashionably virtuous actions in multi-polar people and values policies (see triple bottom lines, CSR’s, ‘our values…’ and similar which have funded lots of good printing and facilitating over the last decade).
Something like this: let Diversity@work propose a good influencing diversity and inclusion prize for major organisations in the different governance types – private, listed, NFP and government of the three levels (local, state and national). The prize would be for real (not best) efforts to undertake a bully cleansing exercise at the highest levels. It could, for example, focus on proof of competence (a set of agreed behaviours that are known to be central to influencing others) not to bully and a test period for probationary members of the elect. The influencing activity would focus on agreed public settings in which they function – corporate meetings of various sorts. A small investment by D@W would found a project to define rough parameters for such an enterprise. I look forward to hearing from them about it.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Confidence amid calamity
Confidence amid calamity
Torrey Orton
170109
Confidence is a creature of capability and competence. Reading John Hewson (AFR 160109 – “Blind leading the blind”) and a plethora of other economic commentators, we could believe the reverse is the case: that confidence is the creator of competence. If only we could print it like money, then we could recover from our economic calamities. It is the dark energy in most commentators’, observers’ and bloggers’ understanding of our times.
Hewson finishes excoriating the economics crowd by asserting that “Economists are not really good at saying exactly what will make that happen.” - the confidence that is (while implicitly counting himself among them by not counting himself out). There’s a good reason for his judgment: because you can’t get there from here soon enough. Confidence is not a product nor is it an outcome. It’s a platform or a precursor to outcomes, which can be increased by success (especially against odds and difficulties). Confidence is, in brief, a mix of material predictability (the capacity to make ‘things’ happen) and intentional community (the desire to do it together).
The false confidence based on material predictability alone we’ve seen a lot in modern times. And some would argue that the dominant tendency to seek outcomes for self over others in the last few decades has eroded the will to community (and distorted the relationships though which the will could be expressed). If we seek confidence about and from the economy alone, as economists tend to, we cannot get the whole thing.
Self-esteem, happiness and other emotional assessments like confidence cannot be created by direct instruction. We cannot achieve them by trying to be them. We can only achieve them by living. Put another way, confidence and self-esteem and happiness, etc.) can only be had by successful learning and doing. These emotions tell us how we are doing along the way; they are not the doing itself. When we are doing OK, the feelings support our next steps into new learnings (unknown settings, new tasks, etc.).
Back to our calamitous times. In the short term (1-5 years, say), what can we do to re-create confidence? A starting place is to tell the truth of our declining confidence. First, it is increasingly unlikely we can have, or hope for, predictability in material matters. The world of material certainties is fading around us as a (perfect) storm of personally uncontrollable forces assail us. Not merely is it the economy stupid. It’s also the climate and the fluids (fuels and waters), the food and the pervasive speed of movement of them all., plus a gathering of insights and innovations which mark the growing edges of the sciences.
Second, we are engaging these forces from a weakened position in our fragmented relationships. And these weaknesses will be enhanced by the times which are the reasons for our worries in the first place. Making the effort for the longer term will be even more important as each day of its decline passes.
This, telling the truth, is something our leaders (especially, but not only, political) seem uniformly unable to do. One commentator (see Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday Jan. 11, ‘09 ) suggests that even those leaders who display occasional truth-telling tendencies (often appearing in unguarded ‘mis-spokes’ quickly reversed in appalling tangled circumlocutions prefaced with first name addressing of the interviewer and .. “Look,…”) are caught in a situational Catch 22: if they said they did not know what to do at this time, they would be turfed out and maybe the people would feel bad and hopeless. But the research on credibility shows the masses don’t believe them anyway, so I’m not sure who would be surprised. The exception is the credibility of perceived intentions or character of leaders for religious believers – even in the face of evidently incompetent pursuit of those intentions with flawed character. That is a kind of confidence.
I look forward to the first public utterance of these two truths by any government or corporate leader (commentators and not-for-profit leaders already do).
Torrey Orton
170109
Confidence is a creature of capability and competence. Reading John Hewson (AFR 160109 – “Blind leading the blind”) and a plethora of other economic commentators, we could believe the reverse is the case: that confidence is the creator of competence. If only we could print it like money, then we could recover from our economic calamities. It is the dark energy in most commentators’, observers’ and bloggers’ understanding of our times.
Hewson finishes excoriating the economics crowd by asserting that “Economists are not really good at saying exactly what will make that happen.” - the confidence that is (while implicitly counting himself among them by not counting himself out). There’s a good reason for his judgment: because you can’t get there from here soon enough. Confidence is not a product nor is it an outcome. It’s a platform or a precursor to outcomes, which can be increased by success (especially against odds and difficulties). Confidence is, in brief, a mix of material predictability (the capacity to make ‘things’ happen) and intentional community (the desire to do it together).
The false confidence based on material predictability alone we’ve seen a lot in modern times. And some would argue that the dominant tendency to seek outcomes for self over others in the last few decades has eroded the will to community (and distorted the relationships though which the will could be expressed). If we seek confidence about and from the economy alone, as economists tend to, we cannot get the whole thing.
Self-esteem, happiness and other emotional assessments like confidence cannot be created by direct instruction. We cannot achieve them by trying to be them. We can only achieve them by living. Put another way, confidence and self-esteem and happiness, etc.) can only be had by successful learning and doing. These emotions tell us how we are doing along the way; they are not the doing itself. When we are doing OK, the feelings support our next steps into new learnings (unknown settings, new tasks, etc.).
Back to our calamitous times. In the short term (1-5 years, say), what can we do to re-create confidence? A starting place is to tell the truth of our declining confidence. First, it is increasingly unlikely we can have, or hope for, predictability in material matters. The world of material certainties is fading around us as a (perfect) storm of personally uncontrollable forces assail us. Not merely is it the economy stupid. It’s also the climate and the fluids (fuels and waters), the food and the pervasive speed of movement of them all., plus a gathering of insights and innovations which mark the growing edges of the sciences.
Second, we are engaging these forces from a weakened position in our fragmented relationships. And these weaknesses will be enhanced by the times which are the reasons for our worries in the first place. Making the effort for the longer term will be even more important as each day of its decline passes.
This, telling the truth, is something our leaders (especially, but not only, political) seem uniformly unable to do. One commentator (see Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday Jan. 11, ‘09 ) suggests that even those leaders who display occasional truth-telling tendencies (often appearing in unguarded ‘mis-spokes’ quickly reversed in appalling tangled circumlocutions prefaced with first name addressing of the interviewer and .. “Look,…”) are caught in a situational Catch 22: if they said they did not know what to do at this time, they would be turfed out and maybe the people would feel bad and hopeless. But the research on credibility shows the masses don’t believe them anyway, so I’m not sure who would be surprised. The exception is the credibility of perceived intentions or character of leaders for religious believers – even in the face of evidently incompetent pursuit of those intentions with flawed character. That is a kind of confidence.
I look forward to the first public utterance of these two truths by any government or corporate leader (commentators and not-for-profit leaders already do).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)