As I travel around the country, the epidemic of indirectly hostile behaviours, directed toward consumers/customers, becomes more and more apparent. These are behaviours that say, primarily non-verbally: “I will do what I’ve been trained to do; say what I’m supposed to say; provide you with what you practically want from my company; but not make this interaction either pleasant , nor positive. In addition, it will be hard for you to confront me, since I’m not doing anything overtly rude or offensive.”An example: I recently arrived at a hotel around 11:00 pm, suitcase and briefcase in tow, and approached the front desk. The young lady on duty started out the interaction on the wrong foot, by asking me how she could help me. I’ve always been puzzled by this question. What else would I be interested in doing at that late hour, suitcase in hand, other than checking in to her hotel? (In the last year, I’ve taken to occasionally saying that I’m selling suitcases, and would she be interested in looking at the model I have with me.)Let’s back up a bit. As I approached the front desk, the young woman had a look on her face that could cut glass. Even though I see it more than I’d like to, it’s hard to accurately describe. There is no smile, no animation, and no range of feeling tone. But it is by no means neutral. It says, very strongly; “I don’t like being here; I don’t like my job; and I don’t like you.” I understand, intellectually, that it’s not about me personally. I simply represent an intrusion and an irritant in her life. (The gate agents at the Atlanta Airport have taken this look to its absolute zenith. They’ve made it an art form.)After we determined that I was there to actually spend the night at the hotel, she started going through the motions of doing what she was trained to do. Here is the exact dialogue, word for word:Front deskClerk: “Last name?”Me: “Shechtman – S,H,E,C,H,T,M,A,N”Clerk: “How’s that spelled?”Me: “S,H,E,C,H,T,M,A,N”Clerk: “First name?”Me: “Morris”Clerk: “Method of Payment and Form of Identification?”Me: “It should be billed to my client’s credit card. I stay hereevery month.”Clerk: “It doesn’t indicate that in your reservation. Oh, wait,now I see it.”(I am not abbreviating or altering anything. This interaction had all the panache of a police interrogation.) At this point, I had had it. The following dialogue ensued:Me: “Am I interrupting something?”Clerk: (Somewhat flustered) “No, I just need to ask you thesequestions.”Me: “I don’t mind the questions. I do mind your attitude.”At this point, an awkward silence ensued. Then, the most amazing thing happened. Her whole gestalt shifted. Her face filled with softer feelings, she engaged me in a brief conversation about why I come there every month, and she found the kind of room I preferred (which was not in my reservation).What happened here? First, I established my boundaries and my expectations. Second, I set limits and boundaries for her (that she couldn’t set for herself) and that gave her a sense of safety and a feeling of being cared for. Why is this important? Because 95% of the time we miss the opportunity to grow and develop people, by ignoring irritating and inappropriate behavior. You see and feel exactly what I see and feel. The difference is in what we choose to do about it.I am not suggesting that you become the “feedback police” and build your whole life around confronting people and being a royal pain in the ass. I am suggesting, that you pay attention to your gut, and share with people exactly how they’re impacting you, and how damaging that can be to their future. Most career-compromising behavior is not dramatic. It subtlety drives people away, and neither party really understands what has happened. All they know is that they no longer want to deal with that person. If you truly want to help people, personally and professionally, you owe them the dignity of a genuine and caring response to their self-limiting actions.
“New Lows In Customer Service: The Art Of Malicious Compliance.”
“Pretty Woman Syndrome: Helping Good-Looking People Overcome Their Handicap”
“The New Normal – Unending Unpredictability”
For a number of years now, I’ve heard people talking about how unpredictable
business has become; with the implied assumption that one of these days, the
unpredictability will finally end, or at least, level off, and we’ll return to
a generally predictable environment. Well, from everything I see and
experience, that ain’t ever going to happen. Unpredictability is here to
stay, and the implications are sobering.
First and foremost, is the fact that we have unequivocally entered the Age
of Self-Doubt. I have never, in my professional life, worked with and
encountered so many talented, highly skilled, and successful people, who are
haunted by self-doubt. People, who prior to these times, made one
decision after another, with a great sense of clarity and certainty, now
second-guessing almost everything they do.
Everyone, at times, has some doubts; but now the experience seems to have
become endemic and epidemic. It has become a part of our daily lives and
our ongoing personal and professional experiences. So how do we deal with
and come to terms with it? First, we need to realize that we are not
alone with this feeling. It is shared by all of us, and has become a part
of the global consciousness.
Second, we need to look at and assess our inventory of life skills to
determine what personal assets we have that will help us do well and flourish
in this environment, and what deficits we’re going to have to work on. In
terms of the skills, here are some of the most important:
We need (and we need to surround ourselves with) people who can live in and
perform in, the moment. We can no longer accommodate colleagues who live
in the past, or are always anticipating the future. This requires the
ability to grieve well – to be able to say goodbye to what we used to do, and
who we used to be – and the ability to realistically assess the present and
come to terms with what it is, not what we’d like it to be. In other
words, we need to give up our “hope trips.”
We need to be life-long learners and come to terms with the fact that we’ll
never be “finished’ with working on ourselves. To be able to do
this, we need to be open to feedback, and open to constantly increasing our
self-information. One of the things we need to stop doing is to defend
our position, and act like we’re on trial. We need to get a lot better at
listening to the feedback we get about who we are; and to ask ourselves if what
we’re hearing makes sense, and how we can use it to improve ourselves.
We need to develop an emotional compass that allows us to stay centered and
focused, in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and unpredictability.
That is, the ability to stay with the task at hand, knowing that there are no
guarantees in the near or distant future.
We need to look at our need for control, and our level of trust; and work to
establish the best ratio between the two. In an Age of Self-Doubt, the
temptation to increase control is heightened, and the tendency to lower one’s
trust is increased. What we need, however, is just the opposite.
High control and low trust dramatically inhibits our ability to grow and
increases anxiety and tension. Low control and high trust allows us to
mediate in this “new normal,” without driving ourselves crazy.
We need to be able to talk about our feelings, in real time.
Especially when those feelings are about our worries and concerns. It’s
hard to convince people (especially business people) that talking about things
that worry us, or situations that suck, helps us get through them, and defuses
the anxiety associated with them. We don’t need to always fix or change
things that bother us; but we do need to talk about them, in order to feel
better and get things done again. Complaining is fine; as long as that’s
not all you do.
Arleah has a saying in her practice: “You don’t need to always
get your way; but you do need to always get your say.”
We need to talk about and face, with the people closest to us, our doomsday
scenarios. Businesses would get through a lot more of their problems if
they trusted themselves, when they’re facing hard times, to talk about the
worst case outcomes. Verbalizing the worst possible outcomes,
dramatically decreases the anxiety and tension surrounding them, and frees up
an amazing amount of energy tied up in circular worrying. It allows you
to identify the really important things in your life, and put the worries in
perspective.
A number of years ago, I was talking with a client in southern California,
about the challenges he faced in the work he did. We were driving around
(in his Rolls Royce) looking at some of the shopping centers he was involved
with. What he did, was guarantee, through surety bonds, that immense
construction projects would be finished by a date certain. If they were
not, he would be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. I asked
him if he had any trouble sleeping at night, knowing how much he was on the
line for. He responded, without any hesitation: “I sleep like
a baby. I’m worth close to a hundred million. After that, there’s
no more to get out of me. The worst thing that can happen is that I end
up poor. I’ll live through it.”
I have never forgotten his words. Arleah and I often talk about where
we started our journey together. We still remember that we got our first
TV by selling the puppies from one of our dogs first litters. It gives us
some perspective when we get caught up in worrying.
October 2011
“The Strange Experience Of Death: My Mother’s Passing”
Note: This was written the day after my mother died – Sept. 26th My mother died yesterday. I got a call at 5:30 in the morning telling me that she died in her sleep. Her heart just stopped beating. It was a call I had been expecting for at least the last two years, but I was still surprised and stunned. I wasn’t shocked – we had been told innumerable times that given her medical problems, it was a certainty that her heart would eventually stop. I don’t think there’s any way to reconcile the factual knowledge with the feelings; no way to prepare oneself for the actual news. I sat on the side of our bed, in a kind of fog. I didn’t quite know what to do next, or even how I was feeling. Arleah sat down next to me and held my hand. I tried to remember what the person at the nursing home had said – something about taking our time and that she would be in her room. When we got to the home, I was very aware of being scared to see her dead. I have dealt a lot with death in my professional life, but not much with dead bodies. When we walked into her room, she was laying in her bed, hands folded over her stomach, covered with a blanket up to her shoulders. Her mouth was wide open, like it usually was when she was asleep. There was no doubt, however, that she was not asleep. A grayish pallor had already consumed her head. The staff at the facility, who were extraordinarily kind and sensitive, asked us to remove things of value from her and her room. I can’t tell you, in words, how strange a feeling it was to be opening drawers and cabinets, going through little boxes of trinkets and costume jewelry; doing all this, two or three feet from her dead body. I opened one drawer to find three unused cans of root beer – winnings from bingo. The cans had been there for at least a year and a half. It’s funny what we value and keep around. At one point, Arleah and I realized that we had been whispering to each other while we were looking through things obviously, afraid of waking her up. I became aware of having regressed back to childhood, watching those primitively done horror films where dead people suddenly popped up from their beds or coffins, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone in the room (and in the audience). It was particularly weird and disturbing when it came to retrieving her wedding ring. It is a unique and classy ring and my mother always wanted Arleah to have it. It was, however, still on her hand; and it seemed kind of ghoulish to be trying to take her ring off of her lifeless and limp hand. I felt, for a moment, like one of those grave robbers, featured in those “B” movies about Egyptian pyramids. Thankfully, we were rescued by a nurse’s aide who put some lotion on my mother’s hand, and slipped the ring right off. I did a pretty good job of holding myself together until a few staff members, one at a time, came into the room and told us what a pleasure it had been to take care of, and to know my mother. For some reason, that touched me more than anything else that day. I also lost it when the fellow from the funeral home came to take her body away. He was extraordinarily sensitive, but it felt so crass and mechanistic to put her into a bag, zip it up, and cart her out, like some kind of a package. Seeing her head disappear under the zipper, hit me like a rock in the head. Its over; she’s gone; forever. Later that day, we went over to the funeral home to start the whole process going that would eventually result in a funeral ceremony back in Chicago. If we had thought that we had already experienced some weird feelings, we had underestimated how weird this experience would be. Everything we discussed with the funeral director was necessary to talk about, but felt amazingly incongruous, given the fact that my mother had just died hours ago. We had a protracted discussion about the practical and financial implications of embalmment; the position of the Jewish cemetery (where she is to be buried next to my father) on embalmment and the timing of the burial; the laws in Illinois about embalmment; and the intricacies of transporting her body to Spokane, first, and then Chicago, next. The absolute weirdest conversation was about packing her body in a material similar to dry ice, if she were not to be embalmed. At that point, I was beginning to feel like we were trapped in an Edward Albee play about the absurdities of American rituals around death. In a strange way, this venture into black humor was a welcome relief from the oppressiveness of dealing with her death. To say that I went through a range of feelings that day, would be an understatement. I was on a veritable emotional roller coaster. I felt profound grief and sadness; a sense of relief that it was finally over (I had come to feel, these last two years, that we had been on a protracted death watch); and a feeling of regret and remorse over how irritated and angry I would get over her withdrawal, especially this past year, into her very private and non-relational world. I want to remember my mother for the truly extraordinary woman she was. She was a pioneer in her era; a rebel with a very clear cause; and a no-nonsense lady, who took no crap from anyone. She had an early career in the entertainment industry that perhaps a handful of young Jewish girls ever achieved. She was a “career woman” and a housewife way before it was fashionable. And she took no prisoners when she had an opinion that she felt was the right one. She taught me to think on my feet, defend my positions, and to hold my own in any public forum. When people ask me where I learned public speaking, I tell them that I was doing it at the dinner table every night, from five years old, on. She also taught me “class”; to aspire to be the best; never to settle; and to do things the right way, or not at all. She was a beautiful woman, who had an “outfit” for every possible human activity. She weighed the same in her 80’s that she did in her 20’s, and she had a killer figure well into her 70’s. I’m one of the few people I know who has “cheesecake” photos of their mother (from her Hollywood days). She was a fiercely loyal wife, and loved my father more than anything else in the world. She raised her children to be successful, and taught us a value system that has served all of us very well. When my mother went anywhere (especially with my father), everyone noticed her arrival. That’s how I’m going to remember her. Morrie
“The Lost Art of Connecting”
introduced myself and told her that I was calling in response to her email
about my survey responses). She said nothing to connect with me, or segue off of her inquiry or my remarks. I had to literally lead the conversation, or it would have not gone anywhere. Her responses to the problems I had encountered (keys that didn’t work, and my room vibrating for five or ten minutes) were without emotion, and mechanical at best. I had to volunteer the explanations I was given, at the time, and she responded with a tepid apology and a certificate for a free night. She had no particular response to the hotel’s dryer shaking rooms all the way up to the third floor, or to the supposed dynamiting at a local quarry, about a half mile from the hotel (the engineer’s explanation). We could just as easily been talking about the absence of a newspaper at my room door in the morning.
What’s Your Interpersonal Impact?”
There are a lot of things that business people learn about and focus on – management, sales, finances, succession. But it is rare for them to pay much attention to their interpersonal impact.What I mean by that is captured in a question that I often ask my clients: “After people meet you for the first time, what do they think about who you are, and how do they feel about you? Do they think you’re pretty smart; not so smart; pretty congenial and friendly; not so approachable; a real professional; or a rank amateur? And do they feel good and positive toward you, and look forward to getting to know you better? Or do they feel like there’s a huge impenetrable wall up that they could never surmount?I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, for a couple of reasons. First, because the most recent research on first impressions, is really sobering. According to a number of studies, you have around 118 seconds to make an impression and impact on another person. This applies to both personal and work relationships. That’s not a lot of time. And it certainly blows apart the old homily about how it takes a long time to get to know someone. In our culture, if it does take you a long time to get to know people, you probably won’t know many. You may dislike this shift in the culture at large, and certainly in the business environment, but not paying any attention to it, can limit your opportunities, and your adaptability to changing modes of communicating with people. Just look at what’s happened with webinars. We’ve discovered that most people lose interest in the typically structured webinar, in under a few minutes; and start fiddling with their favorite form of technology, or start daydreaming.The other reason I’ve been pondering this, springs from a recent encounter I had with a politician in one of our national bodies. We both spoke at a meeting and had some time to interact with each other. Most of the positions he takes I have no problem with. But as a person, I was very put-off and even repulsed. At this point in my life, I’m quite used to political superficiality (someone talking to you, while they’re sizing up the room with their eyes). But this fellow didn’t even make an effort to be superficial. And, in addition, everything about him, non-verbally, reeked of mean-spiritedness. So even though we may be strategically aligned, I wouldn’t vote for him if he were the only person running in a one candidate election. And the saddest thing is, that I’m fairly certain that he is clueless as to his impact on others.So, I have a question for you. “What do you want to accomplish when you meet with someone?”And I don’t mean, here, tactically or task-wise. I do mean, what kind of person-to-person bridge do you want to build, and what kind of feeling tone do you want to create? You’re already doing this unconsciously and automatically. What I’m suggesting, is that you take conscious charge of this process, identify exactly the impact you’re having on others, and ask yourself if that’s what you want to accomplish. If you’re unclear about the impact you have, ask the most significant people in your personal and work life – they’ll have no problem identifying what it is. If part of your work is developing other people, the greatest gift you can give them, is honest and direct feedback on how they impact you and how you feel about that impact. Nothing else will come close to the value of that kind of information, in helping them grow, develop, and succeed.
On a recent flight, I had a most interesting conversation with my seatmate. (He had a fascinating job – costing out massive infrastructure projects all over the world. He had a unique take on the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East – that it would be a boon for Western countries because it would create billions of dollars of projects in underdeveloped countries.) We were discussing what each of us did, and at one point, he said, “Business can really screw up your personal life.” In my own inimical fashion, I heard myself saying, “No, you’ve got it backwards. Your personal life can really screw up your business.” He looked kind of quizzical and asked what I meant. I then had to quickly figure out what I did mean. (As I’ve said, on a number of occasions, I don’t plan what I say, very often. It’s almost always what I mean, but I figure it out after its released from my mouth.)
I have had people ask me if this methodology is not tantamount to putting undo pressure on people who are already under immense pressure. My response is – absolutely! I call it, the “Kick’em When They’re Down” theory of change. People only change when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of staying the same. The best time to initiate change is when the pain trajectory is on the upswing.
April 2011
Stop Working On Themselves”
(Harvard Business Review, 2011)
This quote captures the essence of the seminar that I’ll be teaching this summer at the University of Montana. Its designed for experienced businesspeople and professionals who want to accelerate their own growth as well as the growth of their organizations. The premise of this learning experience is simple: The growth potential of all your relationships – with individuals, groups, or organizations – is capped by the self-imposed limits of your own personal growth. I learned, through my experiences as therapist, coach, and consultant, that I could take my clients not one step further than I had gone myself.
“The Leadership Challenge: Managing Yourself for Growth and Change”
June 10 – 12, 2011. Missoula, Montana
This is a great opportunity to dramatically expand your leadership skills and abilities while also enjoying a true Montana experience. We’re working with the owners of a very unique ranch (Dunrovin Ranch in Lolo, MT) to integrate an afternoon and evening experience at their property, with the seminar experience at the Business School. When you go to the seminar website, be sure, when you look at the “Seminar Schedule and Location,” to click on the link for “Dunrovin Ranch – Taste of Montana!” The ranch folks have put together some amazing adventures involving rafting (easy or very challenging); riding (tranquil or spectacular); and biking (thru mind-blowing vistas). These are all available to family, friends, etc. that may be coming with you.
To get to the seminar website, go to: www.business.umt.edu/leadership
You can register online at:
https://www.bber-secure.umt.edu/registerLC2011.asp.
If you want to know more about my background and read a testimonial go to:
http://www.business.umt.edu/DegreesPrograms/LeadershipChallenge/LeadershipChallengeInstructor.aspx.
The seminar is limited to 25 participants, so register early to reserve your spot.
“Picking Winners & Keepers” – Sign Up For The Next Class
The next class of our unique interactive learning experience focused on recruiting and selection, begins April 20th (and runs thru June 1st). The course features on-line self-study combined with instructor-led teleconferences, incorporating 1-on-1 accountability and coaching.
It is built around the material I’ve developed over thirty years of work with over a thousand organizations, and is a joint venture with Training Implementation Services, an equally experienced company which has, I believe the most effective and leading edge delivery system for training and developing our workforce. If you or any of your colleagues has ever made a hiring mistake, or struggled with ambivalence after an interview, this is the course for you.
If you want more information on the course or want to make sure you get in the April 20th session, contact John Stout. John is one of the principals of TIS and is our lead facilitator for the class. You can reach John at: john.stout@performancecounts.com
Now, for the newsletter –
Business: “Is Your Personal Life Screwing Up Your Business?”
On a recent flight, I had a most interesting conversation with my seatmate. (He had a fascinating job – costing out massive infrastructure projects all over the world. He had a unique take on the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East – that it would be a boon for Western countries because it would create billions of dollars of projects in underdeveloped countries.) We were discussing what each of us did, and at one point, he said, “Business can really screw up your personal life.” In my own inimical fashion, I heard myself saying, “No, you’ve got it backwards. Your personal life can really screw up your business.” He looked kind of quizzical and asked what I meant. I then had to quickly figure out what I did mean. (As I’ve said, on a number of occasions, I don’t plan what I say, very often. It’s almost always what I mean, but I figure it out after its released from my mouth.)
I have had people ask me if this methodology is not tantamount to putting undo pressure on people who are already under immense pressure. My response is – absolutely! I call it, the “Kick’em When They’re Down” theory of change. People only change when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of staying the same. The best time to initiate change is when the pain trajectory is on the upswing.
Political/Cultural: “The Arrogance of the Poor: Entitlement and the Lack of
Perspective”
Most nights Arleah and I watch the news on three different outlets. At 7:00 we watch PBS, at 8:00 we watch CNN, and at 9:00 we watch FOX News. All three have guest “commentators” supposedly representing a continuum or spectrum of political ideologies. PBS’s commentators run the gamut from far left to moderately left; CNN’s from moderately left to slightly right of center; and FOX News’ from far right to moderately right. If a ringer accidentally gets booked, who actually represents a legitimately contrarian point of view, they get patronized and co-opted, or just talked over. The differing perspectives, on the three networks, are fascinating; and some nights we wonder if all these commentators live on the same planet.
Personal: “Losing a Parent: The Death Before the Death”
I have written a few times about my mother’s deteriorating health and the impact on our relationship. I’ve discussed the changes in her, from a vibrant, curious, somewhat argumentative person, to a passive, non-communicative, almost obsequious individual. The transformation has been stark, and deeply saddening, but there has always been a ray of hope, when she would suddenly come alive, and really engage us in a true interaction. Those moments, admittedly, were few and far between, but they stoked our hope that, at some level, she was still there. That hope has now vanished. She is now gone. Her body remains, but her soul has departed.
High Accountability of Micromanagement
With superheated competition and a comprehensive examination of everyone and everything in business, these days, the question often asked me is: “How do I know when I’m being a high accountability, very effective manager; or being a micromanaging harasser?” In fact, I just had a conversation about this today, with a good friend and client, Jim Tierney.
Let me answer it this way. Everything of any importance deserves to be monitored. The only question, is how? The high accountability manager, in concert with direct reports, sets specific dates and times for assessing progress on work toward the accomplishment of certain goals. In addition, it is made quite clear, that it is the responsibility of the worker being held accountable, to notify the manager, immediately, of any circumstance that has occurred, that could interfere with the timelines that have been established. It is not the manager’s job to be poking around in anticipation of a failure to achieve results. This poking around, and “checking up,” outside of previously established monitoring meetings, is what I define as micromanagement. (Another good friend and client – Damon Shelly – introduced me to the term “pester management,” which really captures the essence of micromanagement.) It is low trust, disabling, and depreciating. It is assumed, also, that clear consequences for the achievement, or lack of such, have been articulated and understood, by both parties.
Micromanagers do unto others, what was done to them. As soon as the possibility of failing at something looms on the horizon, they are drawn to pestering and harassing, like addicts to meth. The low trust they grew up with kicks in, and it becomes next to impossible to let others struggle, fail, and ultimately, learn. It is important to realize, that micromanagement is the purest form of unlearning. If you want to avoid it, look hard at how you view failing at something, and see what it means to you. Is it an opportunity to learn something new (albeit not a fun experience); or a complete condemnation of who you are as a person? Discovering the answer to this, will prove a lot more fruitful than applying some hackneyed tactics.
February 2011
The twenty-four hour news cycle initiated by cable television, has tended to trivialize the notion of “history in the making.” But these last two weeks have truly brought life to the concept. Both in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as here in the U.S., history is being made.
The fall of brutal, dictatorial regimes in the Arab world is certainly significant, but it is nothing more than the tip of the cultural iceberg. What is going on is the two-fold beginning of the most fundamental changes in Arab society and Islam, in hundreds of years. What we are witnessing is the dismantling and rejection of tribalism (and its political counterpart), and the long-postponed reformation of Islam. This is not a groundswell, from the populace of these countries, for democracy, Western style, or otherwise. The biggest mistake we can make is to expect some magical transformation, or even transition, to an open, truly free political playing field. What we will undoubtedly see, is a succession of less brutal, less autocratic rulers. Arleah and I saw this when we were in Russia as the Soviet Union ended. Everyone we talked with had the same answer to the question we asked them, about their expectations of the next political system. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, had any interest in a democracy. Everyone we talked with was glad to be through with Communism. What they wanted, without exception, was a Czar. A “nice Czar,’ but a Czar for sure.
The participation, and in some cases, the prominent role played by women, in the various rebellions, is the clearest sign that Orthodox Islam is under assault and is beginning to be dismembered. From my perspective, this is the most optimistic and encouraging aspect of the revolutions underway in the Middle East and North Africa. Islam is the last major religion to undergo a reformation, and it can’t happen fast enough. Unreformed Islam has fed (and continues to feed) our contemporary world-wide reign of terror, and no military or political interventions will quell it. A reformation of Islam has the only true chance.
At home, the tumult in a number of state legislatures signals the beginning of the end of the entitlement state. The bizarre wage inflation, the nutty pension benefits, and the tyranny of low-risk unions, is seeing its sunset. Beginning in the 1960’s we started paying people obscene amounts of money for doing pedestrian work; providing them with equally obscene sinecures for doing nothing (often while they were in their 50’s); and bowed to state-endorsed extortion in “labor negotiations.” To use the popular phrase of the day – “the chickens have come home to roost.” All but two states are financially untenable, and a bunch of those are teetering on bankruptcy. Our state legislators have made drunken sailors look like responsible citizens. Every state may not win this round, but you can take it to the bank, that the old deal is over. The New, New Deal will realign relationships between “labor” and “management” and reinstitute the role of risk-takers in rebuilding the economy.
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Business Tips
“High Accountability or Micromanagement”
With superheated competition and a comprehensive examination of everyone and everything in business, these days, the question often asked me is: “How do I know when I’m being a high accountability, very effective manager; or being a micromanaging harasser?” In fact, I just had a conversation about this today, with a good friend and client, Jim Tierney.
Let me answer it this way. Everything of any importance deserves to be monitored. The only question, is how? The high accountability manager, in concert with direct reports, sets specific dates and times for assessing progress on work toward the accomplishment of certain goals. In addition, it is made quite clear, that it is the responsibility of the worker being held accountable, to notify the manager, immediately, of any circumstance that has occurred, that could interfere with the timelines that have been established. It is not the manager’s job to be poking around in anticipation of a failure to achieve results. This poking around, and “checking up,” outside of previously established monitoring meetings, is what I define as micromanagement. (Another good friend and client – Damon Shelly – introduced me to the term “pester management,” which really captures the essence of micromanagement.) It is low trust, disabling, and depreciating. It is assumed, also, that clear consequences for the achievement, or lack of such, have been articulated and understood, by both parties.
Micromanagers do unto others, what was done to them. As soon as the possibility of failing at something looms on the horizon, they are drawn to pestering and harassing, like addicts to meth. The low trust they grew up with kicks in, and it becomes next to impossible to let others struggle, fail, and ultimately, learn. It is important to realize, that micromanagement is the purest form of unlearning. If you want to avoid it, look hard at how you view failing at something, and see what it means to you. Is it an opportunity to learn something new (albeit not a fun experience); or a complete condemnation of who you are as a person? Discovering the answer to this, will prove a lot more fruitful than applying some hackneyed tactics.
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Political and Cultural Observations
“The Limits of Tolerance: Somali Pirates”
There is no doubt that our society (and most of Western Europe) has become, over the last four to five decades, exceedingly more tolerant of a myriad of differences within our population. Most institutional racial, ethnic, and religious barriers have fallen, and we seem to be well on our way to diluting, if not eliminating, the hysteria surrounding our reactions to gay folks. I’m old enough to remember when the only shows (and commercials) on television, featured white guys with close-cropped hair, and white women who all looked like they just won the bake-off at the county fair. I now work regularly with Black executives and senior managers, women entrepreneurs and business owners, and management teams that look like a general session of the U.N. I have worked with, in the last few years, senior leadership teams in which white American males represent under 10% of the team.
Unfortunately, as in most cultural shifts, we have bounced from one extreme to the other. Tolerance has slid into license. We now have whole organizations, as well as media outlets, seemingly devoted to justifying anti-social, overtly hostile, and clearly criminal behavior, on the grounds of tolerance and inclusiveness. Any attempts to criticize formerly unacceptable behavior, is immediately met with accusations of racism, bigotry, or xenophobia. We have almost completely lost our ability to set limits and boundaries for acceptable social, political, or economic interactions, and we put up with rude, obnoxious and assaultive behavior that no civilized society should tolerate. We have, interestingly, reached the point, where the Chancellor of the arguably most successful country in Europe, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have pronounced “multi-culturalism” an abject failure.
This slide into license and this acceptance of the unacceptable, has reached its zenith, for me, in the worldwide tolerance of Somali piracy. A few nights ago, on one of the news channels we watch, we saw an interview with an international “expert” of some sort. About halfway through his interview, he made reference to the “business proposition” of the pirates (a weird term to be using in the 21st century – makes it sound like they’re just a group of refugees from Disney World out for a good time). The “business proposition” he was referring to, was of course, the seizing of ships and the holding of hostages for millions of dollars in ransom. Arleah and I looked at each other in disbelief. Did he actually just characterize extortion and kidnapping as a “business proposition?” Yep, he did.
Our government, and every civilized society on this planet, should be ashamed of itself. Currently, these vermin hold thirty vessels and 700 people hostage, under threat of death, and have now murdered four innocent people. And our response has been tepid, State Department whining.
So what should we do?
We should issue the following ultimatum to the pirate leaders:
“You have forty-eight hours within which to release every vessel you occupy. If you fail to do so, or you harm or kill any hostages, you will be hunted down and killed; the villages you come from will be obliterated; and the people who launder your ransom money will be tried as terrorists and war criminals.”
This may seem rather harsh. I have had this debate with people who view this option as lowering ourselves to the same level as the pirates. I categorically reject this analogy. This is what civilized, humane societies have done, and better be prepared to do, to uncivilized, inhumane societies. We did not end the Holocaust by negotiating with the Gestapo.
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Personal Notes
“Me and ‘The King’s Speech’”
“The King’s Speech” moved me in a way that few movies have. Other than “The Notebook” and “Sophie’s Choice,” I have not been as deeply touched by a motion picture.
A lot of people who have seen the picture, talk about the courage and struggle of the King George character. And he undoubtedly conquered much – primarily his own fears and pride – and exhibited, ultimately, an extraordinary bravery. But for me, the King’s “speech therapist,” struck the most resonant chord, and triggered the most powerful feelings.
I was not trained as a psychiatrist, and, consequently, I do not have an M.D. I went through an M.S.W. program and was lucky enough to study with two exceptional psychotherapists – James Forkeotas and Ord Matek – both of whom were geniuses in understanding and practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Also, by that time, I had been in my own therapy for a couple of years, with Robert Mungerson, an M.S.W. himself. I have mentioned Mungerson before. He had an extra-human intuition that, at first, scared the hell out of me, but that ultimately taught me to trust my own, and clearly laid the foundation for the success I’ve had over the past thirty years. Mungerson knew what you were struggling with, where the struggles came from, where you were stuck, and what you needed to deal with; all, in seconds. The only other person I know, who has that finely tuned intuitive ability, is Arleah. She doesn’t “read” people – she locks in on them, merges with their innermost feelings, and gives them a reading on their emotional life that is unerringly accurate, unexpected, and a bit stunning. She is so good at it, that she now does it over the phone and through the internet.
So, by the time I finished my M.S.W., I was ready to practice psychotherapy. I had been a college teacher for five years, in my former field (cultural history and literature) and I already had worked with some private clients in my last year of schooling (which got some faculty in the program near hysteria).
Unfortunately, in 1972, the private practice of psychotherapy was tightly controlled by a coalition of psychiatrists (M.D.’s) and traditional social workers (with some participation by Ph.D. psychologists, who were fighting their own battles with insurance companies), and they had set up a system which required new graduates (and experienced practitioners) to be “supervised” by experienced social workers, in institutional settings, for a number of years. In addition, if you could put up with this arrangement – demeaning and pointless as it was – and you still wanted to go into private practice, you could only do so, with the profession’s imprimatur, by having an “experienced” social worker, or a psychiatrist, regularly “consult” with you (at, of course, their regular professional fees).
As I write about this, I’m struck by how medieval it sounds, particularly in light of the thousands of M.S.W.’s (and other non-medical therapists) now in private practice. It was nothing more than indentured servitude and a way for professional toadies to keep control of the profession and feed their impaired self-esteem by continuing to suck-up to the psychiatric establishment. (In some kind of irony, later in my career, I trained psychiatrists in psychotherapy, since that’s the weakest part of their education.)
As you can imagine, I rejected this path, and set up my practice as soon as I graduated. Numerous attempts were made to try and put me out of business, including the profession’s lobbying of the Illinois legislature to get title protection and licensing of social workers. None of them succeeded; I always found a way around them. The most bizarre thing of all was the effort, on the part of two faculty members, to try and prevent me from being hired by a community mental health center. They were so threatened by what I was doing, that they wrote unsolicited, negative letters to the director, strongly advising her not to hire me.
This was a truly strange time. Part of me was energized by the battle; part of me was getting a bit too much out of the neurotic struggle with rigid, scared people (something I knew well from my early life), and part of me was deeply hurt and puzzled. I was good at what I was doing; I had people who wanted to work with me; and yet, there were others who wanted to take it all away.
I had some allies during this period. One in particular, Gene Trager, was a rebellious psychiatrist who was unimpressed by credentials and formal education (including his own). Gene had studied under Thomas Szasz, the father of radical psychiatry in the U.S. Gene believed in me, valued my clinical skills, and shared my disdain for psychiatric labels and the patronizing attitude of the mental health bureaucracy toward both non-medical therapists and their clients. (If one of our patients in the hospital wanted to be medicated, Gene would sit down with them, hand them the PDR, and ask them to read through the relevant section, and then tell him what medication they thought would be most helpful, and have the least deleterious side-effects. It always caused uproar amongst our colleagues. Gene and I had a saying – “You may be crazy, but you aren’t stupid.”)
Gene’s help in nurturing my career was invaluable, and he went so far as to convince a well-known private psychiatric hospital to extend admitting privileges to me – something that had never happened before.
You can see why King George’s faith and belief in Lionel, touched me so deeply.
One other aspect of their relationship profoundly impacted me. I made a decision, very early in my career (probably very early in my life) that I owed it to my client to always tell them the truth – to tell them what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear. Part of this commitment was to make it absolutely clear that working with me would involve very hard, sometimes painful, and occasionally gut-wrenching work; and that if that was not something they were willing to do, they should work with someone else.
During the course of my professional life, as therapist and consultant, I have told some very powerful, very wealthy, and very influential people, things about themselves that they did not like to hear. Most found it helpful, hung in there, and developed very gratifying and mutually enlightening relationships with me. A few told me to buzz off and not come back.
When I saw Lionel confronting the King of England, I was moved to tears. I know what that feels like, and I know how scary that is, and what courage that takes.
When I have those moments of doubt about how much I’ve accomplished, it’s going to be comforting to think about that ballsy Aussie and the King of England.
Morrie
