Slack.
'One thing I said I could help him with was Leadership. Because I was thrust into that with West Coast.
'And I'll be honest as I have said to him privately...probably not publicly as much as I am about to now...but I probably let him down a few times giving him...probably cutting him too much slack to go home and do all those sorts of things.
'So I don't think I actually helped him. I thought I was doing the right thing by him keeping him happy so he would continue to play football which is...ultimately...I was trying to help the Club.
'But from a Leadership...from a pure Leadership point of view...would I have done that in [his home town of] Melbourne? Well...I would not have had to have done that in Melbourne...to give him a training session off here and there so he could stay back with family and friends back in Melbourne.
'But I thought to keep him happy...to keep him playing happy...I thought that was the most important thing from an early point...
'I went to him and said 'I've probably let you down'.'
- Guy McKenna, Coach of the Gold Coast Suns AFL Team, speaking about Gary Ablett.
The first job of a Leader is to create the Space. Allow people to stretch and become who they are. Whack them if they breach it. Not as discipline or punishment. Not as an exercise in power. Not to diminish the person. To invite them to become as she knows they are.
Evidence that Guy McKenna is a Leader. His humility. His honesty. His measure of himself by his service to others. He doesn't wait to be criticised - to be complained about - for him to proactively admit - 'I failed you. Sorry.'
A month after this interview, Guy McKenna was criticised for allowing Gary Ablett too much freedom leading up to a big game.
The day after the article was published Gary Ablett led in possessions as he captained the Gold Coast Suns to a 40 point win - its first ever - over his former club Geelong.
Elsewhere.
'Nobody cares how you pay your rent. Your job is to show us something we didn’t know we needed to see.'
The best leaders sneak up and buffet us then draw us forward on their slipstream.
We're minding someone else's business. Going through the motions. Comfortable. Smothering our inner restless child with our pillow of outer respectability so none of the other happy successful people around us hears its death rattle.
We're marching to the rhythmic drum drum hum drum drum hum drum of the boss and the managers and the meetings and the courses and the mission statements and the core values and the consultants and the professional development and the change management and the teams and the acronyms and the buzz words and the performance reviews and the clichés and the emails about cake in the staff room and the promise of Friday afternoon.
Loitering for the fortnightly hit from payroll.
She is here. No introduction. No names. No preface or title.
Her voice distracts us from ourselves long enough to rouse the child who squirms free and gasps for air.
We know nothing of her other than she wants to be elsewhere.
She's not waiting for us.
Nor are we.
We leave ourselves behind to go and see.
Simon.
He says: Come Here - so they go There.
He says: Do This - so they do That.
He says: It is Thus - so they say Thus It Is.
He says: Put Money in their Bank - so they say See You Next Week for more He Says.
Be: Creative, productive, innovative, industrious, proactive, engaged, accountable, resilient, loyal, ethical, aligned, happy, autonomous, fearless, motivated, passionate...
No-one moves.
Not without a He Says.
Saying.
Decision-Making is THE act of communication.
What am I saying?
We are the products of our Decision-Making, not our words.
How's that going?
How's the organisation's Decision-Making budget?
Compared to the iDevice budget?
The Marketing one?
Where's Decision-Making in the Staff Development Agenda?
In the Leadership Training?
In the Performance Reviews?
In the Recruitment ads?
In the KPIs?
How do we make right versus right decisions under stress?
How do we integrate what we already know - or think we know - with what we need to discover?
How do we orientate ourselves?
What is the relationship between our problem‐analysis and our Decision‐Making?
What happens when what actually happens does not track with what we assumed?
What awaits us when we look inwards for our moral compass?
What happens when we're wrong?
How do we Make Decisions of Love and Hope?
See.
'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'
- Edmund Burke
See. Name. Point.
See it. See it. See what that person is doing.
Name it. Don't analyse it, judge it, interpret it, filter it, psychoanalyse it, project onto it, condemn it, ignore it.
Point to it. It's over there. It's not in me. It's someone doing a thing. It's not about me. I tell a decision maker the name of what I saw someone else do.
Not a story. A name.
Not what they intended. Not what they were thinking. Not what I was thinking. Not what I wanted it to be. Not what they wanted it to be. Not what I would be intending or thinking if it was me doing the thing.
See. Name. Point.
The Widget is the noun that liberates verbs to bring itself into being.
Agree.
There's banging on the front door of your house where your children are asleep.
'The smoke billowing from your roof is soiling the clothes on my line!' a voice yells.
'Put it in writing,' you yell back. 'And send it to my landlord. She'll let the owner know.'
'No!'
'Well, contact the fire brigade!'
'No!'
You think.
'Would you agree to me passing on your complaint to the fire brigade?' you shout back.
'No. Just stop smoking out my clothes!'
'Would you be happy if I dry cleaned your clothes for you?' you yell.
A van draws up alongside while you're at the traffic lights. The passenger rolls down his window and points at the back of your car.
'Is that a formal or informal gesture about my car?' you say.
The van pulls away as the lights turn green.
'Anonymous!' you mutter under your breath, before accelerating away in a belch of oil smoke and sparks from your dragging muffler.
You catch up to the van at the next set of lights. The passenger repeats the gesture with more animation.
'Vexatious complainant!' you sneer as you raise your middle finger then the volume of the radio.
Organisations pay for opinions - usually called 'feedback' - of customers, clients, employees and random strangers about their Widget.
They hire different people to deter, defend, deflect, delegate, mediate - opinions that are called 'complaints'.
A complaint is information about your Widget from someone who cares enough about their Widget (which may be the same as yours) to give it.
It's your decision - not theirs - serving your Widget - not theirs - as to what you do about it.
Advocate.
"The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons."
- Jean Renoir
The Premier of Western Australia Mr Colin Barnett has not supported a push to remove one of his party members who continues to criticise his government, including calling for Mr Barnett to resign.
Another example of a leader who is on top of his game.
Allowing a critic to remain within the ranks is the sign of a confident leader. And not because of her ego blinding her to the criticism.
The good leader knows that there is wisdom in testing arguments and positions inside the tent before they are released into the wild.
As Dr Tim McDonald says: 'Private honesty. Public loyalty.'
Mr Barnett's accommodation of a dissenting view is also his compliment to the community he serves. He assumes of us what he is demonstrating himself: the maturity to accept that difference is not to be feared.
Mr Barnett is not afraid that the voting public may assume that his party's internal dissent calls into question the ability of his government to run our hospitals and schools and keep our streets safe.
This is what leaders do. They create a space that invites us in to see the version of ourselves that we want to become. 'See?' Mr Barnett says to us. 'I can run an entire State amidst criticism from one of my own. I'm not fleeing. I'm not fighting. I'm smiling. Try it in your own family, workplace, community.'
Very, very few people or organisations can do this. Basically, we don't know how. We don't have the skills. We haven't practised accommodating dissonance. We actively discourage dissent - often quashing it under cover of a breach of 'values' or 'code of conduct'. We drive the our critics to the fringes - until they have to scream so loudly that any merit in their shouted message is dismissed with labels such as 'vexatious'.
If you want to test the maturity and confidence of an organisation or person - say 'complaint'.
Mature people and organisations will seek out dissenters to join their decision making process to kick the tyres.
If they can't find such a critic, they will appoint one. The 'devil's advocate' was someone appointed by the Catholic Church to argue against the canonisation of a person into sainthood.
The mature organisation knows that a dissenter is one of the ways to avoid the trap of groupthink.
The critic - whether internal or external - demands that we explain ourselves - rather than just declare, or even be satisfied by giving reasons for a decision.
A recent study showed that people who were asked to give reasons for an opinion remained convinced of its rightness. While other people who were asked to give a step by step explanation of how they arrived at their opinion were more likely to recognise an error in their thinking and start reviewing their assumptions.
(Herein lies the value of the Five Steps to a Good Decision.)
Therein also lies both the solution and the problem.
Better to cling on to the flawed certainty of our understanding of the world than to expose ourselves to the panic of finding out that we've been wrong.
It's a rare person who can accommodate the distraction in time and energy of a critic.
Which is why we need leaders like Mr Barnett who have the confidence to show us that whether we label it criticism, dissent, disloyalty, or even treason, it's just information.
Another opportunity for us to measure how we're going with our Widget.
Good leaders are rare.
Important.
'It's only in our decisions that we are important.'
- Sartre
Next time you're bored in a meeting, try this.
A Decision will be made.
It can be now. In a few seconds. Later today. Tomorrow. Next year.
One absolute certainty is that a Decision will be made. (Even by default.)
You don't know what the decision will be - you know there will be one. Thus it's almost irrelevant.
Use this certainty as a reference point to work out who are the managers and who are the leaders in the meeting.
The managers will be the ones assembling their dot points for their post-mortem speeches in case the Decision goes wrong. (Most likely to be delivered in hushed tones and with eye rolls in the tea room. 'I tried to tell them that....but they...')
The leader will be holding the space. (She may not be the person at the head of the table by the way.)
She's allowing for the Five Steps - the deliberate process of inquiry - to run its course.
She knows that if she makes a decision that advances her towards where she wants to be - that she cannot make a bad decision.
Her wisdom about the answer liberates her to focus on others.
Watch the leader bravely hold the space. She listens. Asks questions. Listens. Questions. Listens. Listens.
Listens.
Watch the managers and others compete to fling the most words, statements, fears, challenges, complaints, criticisms, and egos within and against the boundaries of that safe space being held for them by the leader.
Spot the manager promoted one or more steps above his competence. You can tell him by his confident assertions. His aim is to declare his opinion rather than to allow it to be tested by the evidence. (That would be too risky.) He wants to be seen as decisive. Sure. Stable. Knowledgeable. Courageous. He does so with the luxury of knowing that he doesn't have to make the decision.
The real bravery in the room is in the leader. Risking being seen as weak. Indecisive. Uncommunicative. As she's talked over. As she holds the space. As she listens.
As she serves everyone else.
Including you. Learning from her as you watch, safe in the space she's created for you. (Guess what - she knows you're watching.)
Regardless of whether it's her decision that is made or followed, she's a leader. Because she created the space and invited you to enter and become who you are.
Allowed you to advance towards your Widget on the way to building hers.
Decisions don't make us important.
The Deciding does.
[Never spotted a leader in a meeting? Of course not. Good leaders are rare.]
Answer.
'I know this stuff inherently,' the senior manager said with a shrug at the end of the presentation.
It's the boss's job to know the answer. Or to know that it's not about the answer.
Knowing - or not knowing - is the beginning. Not the end.
The Widget is our north point from which we measure our knowing.
A good boss knows so much about the Widget that she knows it's never about the Widget.
Good decision making is our boss's way to liberate us from her constraints.
Thus freed, she turns her attention to our cages.
Resolved.
It's rare to hear someone reflect on a conflict in a former workplace and say:
'My life is worse because of it.'
Many people believe that the goal of conflict management is to make everybody happy.
Yet when you ask those people 'What are the chances of that happening?', they shake their heads and say 'It's almost impossible.'
We need to have some reference point as to when a conflict is resolved.
Universal happiness - complainant, respondent, boss, customer, widget - is not a realistic one.
Resolving conflict so that people can get back to the widget has benefits beyond the widget.
It lets them think 'Well, whether I like it or not, it has been resolved and I now need to make choices based upon that.'
It's rare in life to have an umpire who resolves something for us and says 'Here's what's going to happen.'
That's what a good boss does when she resolves a conflict.
We may not like it. We may not agree with it. It may not be what we wanted. Yet it provides a reference point for our decisions about our life and our happiness. We regain control in an environment where we may have felt as though we'd lost it.
What might seem like a loss in the world of my cubicle, can be a win for personal growth, creativity, and realisations about where I want to be in the world of my life.
Trigger.
The majority of people votes for politicians who elect a leader who consults with her Cabinet and makes a decision that she passes on to her General who promulgates orders that are issued down the chain of command to a 19 year old rifleman with the optical scope of his weapon pressed against the pimple on his cheek.
Along with hundreds of other soldiers sailors and airmen issuing orders, pushing buttons, pressing levers and delivering violence upon other humans on seas, in skies, from air conditioned cubicles and lying on other bits of dirt, the teenage Private pulls a trigger and kills a stranger and thus produces his Widget.
Trust is like the lubricant between the working parts of the teenage infantryman's rifle that respond to his index finger pressure and discharge the round at supersonic speeds towards its living target.
Without trust, the mechanism that delivers a decision from the elected leader to the finger of an infantryman will friction and fail.
The military trains Trust.
Navies, Armies and Air Forces have learned and refined over hundreds of years how to recruit, train, exercise, promote, educate, discipline and remember people who demand and honour high levels of trust.
The military's widget - applying maximum violence permitted by law upon the enemy - is designed a long way from where it is delivered by mostly young women and men. They do so while knowing that their own deaths or maiming are part of their adversary's widget.
Trust is a force multiplier.
Police forces demand similar levels of trust. A probationary constable can deprive a person of their liberty and moves among their community with a gun.
Meanwhile, in the open plan battlefield and amidst the chaos and din of values statements, codes of conduct, team building exercises, most managers distrust their workers.
After all, if they were trustworthy, why would they need managing?
Ding-a-Ling.
'It has so much to do with hiring. You see so many big companies that don't understand why they aren't the big disruptive company anymore. Well, that's because you hired these guys that you could work with, and who have the same disabilities as you, and they hired more people that they could boss around with the same disabilities. And you wonder why you've got a bunch of ding-a-lings running around trying to boss everyone around. Well that's who you hired. That's who the company is.'
Recruit hard, manage easy - works both ways.
We don't understand what happened to our enthusiasm. We fall asleep replaying scenes from our day and see ourselves behaving like a ding-a-ling.
Well, that's because we applied for and accepted a job where we're bossed around by a ding-a-ling, whose boss is a ding-a-ling (must be to keep paying a ding-a-ling).
That's who the organisation is.
That's who we are.
Ring it!
Ca-ching! Pay day!
Participants in the arduous training to qualify as United States Navy SEALS signal their decision to quit by ringing a brass bell.
Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling.
'Hey everybody! I'm humiliated and embarrassed to announce I've decided that I don't need to spend the best years of my life being cold, tired, wet, endangered, and in physical and mental pain as I follow orders so that I can kill strangers in defence of my country!'
Ring it!
Whatever the judgement of others - at least have the courage to declare we're playing by someone else's rules. Or not.
Grab that bell and ring it.
I'm here because I need the money.
I'm here because I'm afraid of the alternative.
I'm here because I don't think I'm good enough to be accepted anywhere else.
Liberation into anxious freedom begins with seeing, pointing and naming. Out loud.
Especially the hard and shameful stuff.
Perhaps start with 'Here is the cage I've locked myself into and here is the key that I won't use because I know my cage and I'm afraid of what's outside it.'
Ring it!
Murmuring.
St Benedict stated in his Rule for monks that there is no greater evil in a community than 'murmuring'. That sixth century behaviour translates as gossiping or underhanded and hidden criticism of someone in an organisation - usually in authority.
The character of Don Draper has very little in common with the monastic life. However, he quickly and effectively dealt with murmuring in Season 7 of Mad Men.
He receives a letter purporting to terminate his partnership in the firm. After a moment of reflection (Step 1 - Step Back), he summonses all the decision makers who may have conspired against him out of their offices and into the open plan - where they could each see and be seen by Don, each other, and the other non-decision making staff.
Don: 'Hey! Get out here!' I just got a breach letter with your name on the bottom.'
Roger: 'What?'
Don: 'Joan! Get out here! Joan! Could you get Cooper out here?
Joan: 'What's going on?'
Don: 'Find Pete. No-one knows about this?'
Joan: 'I saw it.'
Don: 'Then why did you say 'What's going on?''
Cooper: 'I want you to calm down. I just called Jim, we're going to get the bottom of this.'
Pete: 'Is there a meeting?'
Don: 'Have you seen this?'
Pete: 'This is outrageous! You know we're going to be at Burger Chef on Monday!'
Roger: 'I vote against this. Right now.'
Jim: 'It's not subject to a vote. The contract is very clear.'
Don: 'You want to play parliamentary procedure? Let's play. Everyone who wants to get rid of me - raise your hand.'
Jim: 'Fine. I have Ted's proxy.'
Cooper: 'You had no right to put my name on that!'
Don: 'Anyone else?... All opposed?...Motion denied!'
Pete: 'That's a very sensitive piece of horse flesh. He shouldn't be rattled!'
- Mad Men Season 7 'Waterloo'.
Good decision making draws the decision maker out of his office into a neutral space of inquiry and invites those who may be affected by it to contribute in full view of each other.
Somewhere.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
- Lewis Carroll - 'Alice in Wonderland'
A good decision is one that advances me towards where I want to be.
Do I know where I want to be:
- In one second (while you're yelling at me)?
- In ten minutes (after you've stormed out)?
- In six hours (after I've read your complaint)?
- Next week (after my boss has read your complaint)?
- In six months (when my performance review is due)?
- In a year (when my daughter asks 'What do you do at work, Daddy?')
- In thirty years (when I'm dying)?
- In 200 years (when my great-great-great-great gand-daughter is researching the Family Tree)?
My boss can answer the first five.
(A good boss cares about six, seven and eight because she cares about one to five.)
Emotion may excuse the answers to one and eight.
Good decision making will answer the rest.
Loud.
Following the Five Steps to a Good Decision is thinking out loud.
It's teaching.
Leaving a trail that others may choose to follow - or not.
Communication.
We grow up to the sound of cheers and boos.
Parents affirm our good behaviour and correct the bad.
Teachers grade our work.
Coaches urge us on and post our scores.
Peers select and reject us.
Employers do the same.
Right up until we give payroll our bank details and pull our chair into our desk and log on.
Then the stands fall silent.
'There's a lack of communication here,' we say.
'I don't get any feedback.'
'Not so much as a 'Thank You'.'
(As we transfer money from our savings account to our mortgage account.)
It's time to grow up.
When the Boss says nothing she's saying:
'I trust you to do the work.'
On pay day she's saying:
'Thank you.'
Trust.
'People do not have to love each other, or even like each other, to work together effectively. But they do have to trust each other in order to do so. Trust between people is the basic social glue: suspicion and mistrust are the prime enemies of reasonable human relationships.'
- Dr Elliott Jacques, 'Requisite Organization'.
A witness in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was asked why he didn't act on a report by one of his staff.
'Because I didn't think that I had enough information to act upon,' was the essence of his explanation.
'If you had witnessed the behaviour yourself, would you have acted upon it?'
'Yes,' he replied.
Here was a rare glimpse into the dirty little secret of almost every organisation and the root cause of their dysfunction.
Bosses won't delegate decision making power because no-one else has the skill to see and interpret information and act upon it as effectively as they can. They're the Boss, after all.
Workers who have delegated decision making power but don't use it because they assume their boss must have a superior understanding of the same information. They're the Boss, after all.
If we fail to act on information given to us by another in the same way that we would if we had first hand knowledge of that information, we declare:
'I don't trust you.'
In which case cancel the off-site team building exercises, Myers-Briggs Tests, Christmas party, external consultant reviews, coaching, values statements, and staff surveys.
And spend the savings on the glue in Payroll to retain the untrusted people who remain to service their mortgages, and to hire the extra managers needed to supervise them.