Sack Your Boss.
A good boss doesn’t want to be your boss.
A good boss wants to spend her time doing good work.
A good boss wants you to do good work.
Do good work.
And sack your boss.
Gift her less boss time and more time to do good work.
If she’s a bad boss.
Sack her.
And find a good boss.
Spontaneity.
Spontaneity has its time and its place.
- Anonymous
Following steps to a good decision sounds as if it robs you of authenticity.
Of spontaneity.
Quite the opposite.
Following a process - whether the Five Steps or another sequence of your own - anchors you in a conscious, aware state, that observes, and learns from, what happens. As you incorporate what you learn, you ‘improve’ - whatever that means.
You grow from ‘Here’s what my parents expected of me’ or ‘Here’s what my boss expects of me’ to ‘Here’s what I expect of me.’
You change into … You.
Before too long, like any habit such as riding a bike or driving a car, the majority of your decisions is unconscious - leaving more attentiveness, capacity, and energy for sudden deviations (the car in front braking) requiring conscious decision making.
Spontaneity.
In that spontaneity is your authenticity.
Your ‘scripted’ stepped out decisions develop your brain to the point where you feel the confidence to be - You.
The world will respond accordingly to this new, unique, never-before-walked-the-earth -
You.
Both Sides of the Story.
Most lawyers work exclusively for one side or the other. Employer or employee. Corporation or consumer. Tax Office or tax payer.
As an Air Force lawyer, I am in the unique position of being appointed duties to act for both sides in different matters. One day for the Commander, the next for a subordinate. One day for the Commonwealth, the next day for a service person.
I get to assert and moderate the power of the government against its citizens.
I get to defend the rights of a citizen against the power of the government.
I took this well rounded perspective for granted for most of my legal career.
I now understand with enormous gratitude to my 36 years as an Australian Defence Force Legal Officer what a unique and precious experience this has been. Walking in the shoes of both sides to an argument has given me first hand experience of the practical application of good decision making.
Because all leadership is about good decision making.
Every Day Your Boss's Agenda Takes Her For a Walk.
Watching owners walking their dogs (or is it the other way around?) the metaphors tumble out like hounds unleashed on a dog beach.
(Is it a ‘leash’ or a ‘lead’? Could whether an owner calls it a ‘leash’ or a ‘lead’ be a form of Rorschach test revealing insights into the psychology of the owner?)
The dog trots from one side of the busy footpath to the other and sniffs at the ground, stretching the leash/lead across the width of the path. Inattentive pedestrians absorbed in our headphones or gazing into the middle distance or otherwise daydreaming, trip over the leash/lead tightly running from the gormless owner’s grip to the dog’s collar.
We think we know where the boss stands.
We assume we know her position on an issue.
We think we know the direction she’s heading.
We think we know where her attention lies.
We predict how she will respond to us.
The problem is - we don’t always see she’s tethered to something else. We don’t see the leash of attachment, obligation, loyalty, debt, sycophancy, agenda, fear, trauma, hope, or her application for a new job stretching across our path between her visible position - and what she’s attached to - until we tumble over it in shock and confusion.
Every day, your boss’s agenda takes her for a walk.
Beware the trip hazard.
Four Benefits.
I know what you’re thinking:
‘I make decisions all day. That’s all I do. Decision making is so routine that I don’t even think about it. And I certainly don’t need to be ‘taught’ how to make decisions by you, or anyone else. That would be embarrassing, quite frankly.’
I hear you…
… and see what you did there?
You showed your working out.
You made your work visible.
You could have just felt patronised by the idea you need to learn how to make a good decision - and moved on. I would never be the wiser as to why.
Instead - you gave me a ‘because’ - which has four benefits:
First, adding a ‘because’ significantly increases my compliance.
Second, it forces you to reflect on your decision, because you have to make it conscious, even if you just think about it and don’t tell me.
Third, it gives me the opportunity to modify my thinking, based on the reasoning you’ve given OR for me to modify your thinking.
Finally, if I work for you or with you, making your work visible helps me to learn from and therefore use, or predict your decisions - which makes less decisions for you to make.
Having a decision making process makes us better decision makers. Making that process visible, or at least becoming aware of our process (assuming we even have one) improves not just our process, but the behaviours of those around us.
In a word: Leading.
Don't Fall For It.
In the movie John Wick 4, Mr Wick is fighting his way up the 222 steps to Sacré Cœur Basilica in Paris, struggling to meet a dawn deadline.
Assailants come at him from all directions, and at one point he tumbles back down several flights to the bottom. He gets to his feet and resumes his journey, dodging a hail of bullets, swords, and lethal projectiles directed at him by dozens of assassins, in a ten minute suspension of disbelief fight scene as only Hollywood can get away with.
The army of shooters sent to impede Mr Wick from reaching his destination has been sent by the person who summoned him to the dawn meeting.
Just your average workplace.
Organisations and your bosses have a number of ways of treating you as if you are a five year old. That inhibits you. It triggers dormant five year old responses.
If you don’t believe me, think of how you unconsciously behave in your workplace. At meetings or presentations in particular. Passive. Submissive. Obedient. Often secretly defiant. Day-dreaming. Texting. Emailing. Switching off. Disengaged.
Don’t fall for it.
Don’t allow the boss or HR or whoever it is that assumes they dominate you to get the jump on you in the arm wrestle. Don’t let them get the upper hand.
Exude confidence. Courteous, respectful, civil, Confidence.
Expect a counter-attack as the superior attempts to assert their positional power.
How do you respond to stay on top?
Make decisions.
Make as many decisions as you can that can then be executed either by you or those who you work with, independently of the superior.
The more decisions you make, the more feedback you gain, the more you learn. The more connections and relationships you form. The more you gain control over your circumstances independently of the power figure.
Sure, the power figure will seek opportunities to put you in your place. Respond respectfully. Nibble on some humble pie from time to time. Give them small wins.
Then get back to making decisions. Small decisions. Big decisions. Make lots.
And remember this:
The person with positional power ALWAYS wins. They will ALWAYS pin you in the arm wrestle.
‘What?!!’ I hear you say. ‘Then - what’s the point? Why bother with all that decision making stuff?’
Because with every decision you make, you learn, grow, build your Widget, build another Widget. Learn about yourself. Your capacity. Other people. Life.
You may choose to leave that boss or organisation.
There will always be another boss or power figure wanting to arm wrestle you.
Your wrestle may (almost inevitably) end up being with fate, or tragedy, or illness or heartache or loss or death.
What your bad bosses and organisations teach you - more than the good ones - is how to wrestle with Life. And that Life is bigger than the boss. And Life goes on.
Bad bosses are exceptionally good teachers of Life.
The submissive five year old never has the thrill and benefit of those lessons.
That’s why they’re stuck as a submissive five year old.
Ideas.
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.
- Carl Jung
Someone has an opinion.
Are they higher or lower than you on the HR wire diagram?
Token conversation.
End of meeting.
Someone has an opinion.
Someone else casually holds it up to the light, turns it, squints and pokes, sniffs, and asks questions. Hands it to another person. ‘Does it come in other colours?’ Another reaches over. ‘Why are you using a screw cap and not a cork?’ Another leans in, inspects the idea, and asks ‘Could you use glass instead of plastic?’
The opinion holder confidently answers and explains. Everyone nods, and takes the opinion away with them.
End of meeting.
Next meeting.
‘We took your opinion, added mag wheels, window tinting, and a spoiler.’
You’re the people I want to hang out with.
You’re the people who make meetings a joy.
Thank you.
Not Broken.
Organisations, bosses, and consultants routinely talk up their people, teams, and clients. Paper over the cracks. Glass half full. Motivate the troops. Be positive.
Because that’s what we do.
Nothing is broken.
The problem with telling the world that nothing is broken - is that it’s a lie. Something is always broken. Something can always be improved.
That’s okay, because we all know how to play the game. We’ve been learning since we were children. The boss knows that - so treats us like children.
We’re not broken.
We wouldn’t know what to do anyway if the boss or the President or Prime Minister said ‘We’re broken. I need your help to fix us.’
We wouldn’t know what to do because -
We’re broken.
Hidden Planets.
Astronomers calculated there must be another planet beyond the limit of their instruments. Their theory was based on the observed irregularities in the behaviour of other objects.
Something else was out there - influencing behaviour.
Observe the behaviour of people in your organisation with the naked eye.
Notice how what they do, differs from what they say, and what they expect of you. See how their walk deviates from their talk.
Another large object, invisible to the eye, is exercising its forces on that person.
A mortgage.
Ambition.
Approval.
Incompetence.
Imposter Syndrome.
These people rely on the veil of hierarchy, civility, and at least one boss who enables their behaviour through wilful blindness or incompetence.
Or because the boss’s judgement and integrity are warped by their own hidden force acting on them.
Omniscience.
The wise person considers a decision with the sober acceptance they may be wrong.
This possibility focusses their mind, motivates them to consult widely and weigh up all the evidence. Even to rehearse the eulogy for their failed endeavour in their head.
The person exercising positional power has no need for that nonsense.
Consulting others is a waste of the authority given to them that commissions them to be decisive. It also undermines the reverence others have for their omniscience.
Besides, if anyone else could do a better job, they’d have the job.
All the positional power person rehearses is pointing the finger of blame.
The Cosmic Widget.
There is your Weekday Widget: The thing you're paid to do or make.
Your Boss’s Widget: The thing your boss is paid to do or make that your Widget plugs into.
Your Employer’s Widget: the thing your employer does or makes that your boss’s Widget plugs into. And so on up the hierarchy.
Your Weekend Widget: the thing you can do with the money you get paid for making your Weekday Widget
There is another Widget that, if defined, may bring clarity to the other Widgets, and thus your decision making:
Your Cosmic Widget.
If you are a person of faith, identifying your Cosmic Widget is easy. It’s the Higher Power you believe you are on earth to serve.
If you’re not, then your Cosmic Widget might be something like ‘To Leave the World a Better Place’, or ‘To Do Unto Others’, or 'To Be Useful’.
Having a Cosmic Widget that lies beyond the immediate needs and gratifications of today, or even a lifetime, can be a profound anchor and guide to reviewing and recalibrating or even entirely replacing your other Widgets. It can also help resolve Widget Conflict: What to do when two or more of your Widgets are not serving each other. Like navigators of old, you can take out your metaphorical sextant and measure your path from here, to the middle distance Widget, to the visible horizon Widget, to a far off Widget such as Eternal Life.
It may even work in reverse. You may find that your Weekday Widget ends up redefining your Cosmic Widget.
Pedal to the Metal.
The young basketball coach delivered a post-game speech to her team of 10 year olds.
‘Next week, we’ve got to put the pedal to the metal!’
‘What does that mean?’ one player asked - as only ten year olds who don’t drive cars and therefore don’t understand the workings of an accelerator pedal, could.
The coach paused, then said, ‘You know… like … when you’re … riding your bike. Pedalling along. It means … go …faster….’ The coach didn’t know the literal meaning either. She just knew - correctly - it meant play hard and don’t slack off. Probably from the context she had heard it used by other coaches.
At first I thought this was a lesson in the importance of our audience knowing our metaphor. You have to have driven a car to apply the metaphor to your context.
Then I realised it represented a more common behaviour of deeper significance.
‘Excellence.’ ‘Committed To.’ ‘Totally Committed To.’ ‘Paramount Importance.’ ‘Team.’ ‘Service.’ ‘Continuous Improvement.’ ‘Agile.’ ‘Community.’ ‘Learning Organisation.’ ‘Customer Focussed.’‘Partnership.’ ‘Leadership.’
Everybody has read, heard or used these words and slogans like them. There’s an assumption that the audience knows what each word literally means.
That’s a patently dumb assumption.
What is ‘Excellence’? ‘Team’? ‘Leadership’? My ‘Agile’ might be your ‘Meh’.
But unlike the ten year old basketballer, few in your audience will ask ‘What does ‘Excellence’ mean?’ - even if we’ve never seen Excellence in the wild in our organisation. No. We’ll nod, reach for a mint, and check our phones beneath the table. Even if we do tempt fate to ask, like the young coach, the speaker or author may well pause, and fumble some unsatisfactory explanation and move on.
Why? Because like the coach, we don’t know what these words literally mean.
And we know that doesn’t matter.
Nobody expects us to. We know they’re not used literally.
We’re only expected to hear the music, not read the lyrics.
We’re only expected to know what using those catch cries signals. We know, like the music score of a movie designed to heighten arousal, these lofty words are a performance.
Most of the time what they signal is that the speaker is exhorting us to do something better or differently. The speaker is almost always a person in positional power, someone engaged by the person in positional power over us to ‘train’ us, or someone trying to sell us something. Like a bugler awakening sleeping troops.
In other words, like the ten year olds who’ve never pressed on an accelerator but knew from the context, that their coach is urging them on, nobody stops to think ‘Hang on - do these people know what ‘Excellence’ looks like? How can they expect ‘Excellence’ from us when we’re so poorly led?’ Instead, we’ve learned from the organisational context that this word coleslaw is just another power flex performance from the boss or someone selling us something. Words don’t matter.
I wonder what would happen if next time you’re being clichéd by catch cries from a motivational speaker, consultant, or boss, you dare to ask ‘When you say ‘Agile’, what does that look like in my context, motivational speaker? What is an example of ‘Agile’, consultant? What do you want me to do, boss?
Or otherwise, just reach for another mint and check your socials.
Bushfire.
Crisis is a distinctive and necessary element of the bureaucratic system. It provides the only means of making the necessary adjustments, and it therefore plays a role in enabling the organisation to develop and, indirectly, for centralisation and impersonality to grow.
- Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
Either schedule regular, controlled burns.
Or wait years for the inevitable uncontrolled bushfire.
Healthy.
"Disempowerment is at the heart of poor health – physical, mental and emotional."
Johan Hari, ‘Lost Connections.’
Good decision making gives you agency over the process that leads to an outcome that leads to information that leads to learning that leads to understanding that leads to decision making that leads to good health.
Looks Like.
The liar relies on their lie looking like the truth.
The boss relies on their bossing looking like leadership.
The lucky man relies on their luck looking like hard work.
The incompetent relies on their chaos looking like transformation.
The pie-warmer relies on their inertia looking like wisdom.
The challenge for the honest, hard working, transformative, competent, wise leader:
Your work looks like failure.
Especially to the lucky, liars, bosses, incompetent, pie warmers.
Busy.
You start your new job.
Not much work. Nobody knows you or your skills.
You’re almost bored.
You complete some tasks and if you do them well … more work comes in.
(If you don’t do them well, work fizzles because you add no value to others’ work.)
More good work begets more work. Until you’re doing so much work that you earn that badge of honour that, when people ask ‘How’s work?’ You qualify to answer:
‘Busy.’
You’ve made it.
And that’s where most of us stay.
Busy. So busy. Can’t-wait-for-the-weekend busy.
You’ve learned that Busy is the natural state of a good worker.
Ask around.
Everyone is busy.
Busy = success = good person = alibi for missing a child’s assembly. Busy.
Busy. Always busy.
You don’t want not to be busy - because, as explained above, it’s a sign of incompetence.
You’re wrong.
Not being busy is evidence of being outstanding at your job. You stand out. Exceptional. You are the exception. In the 1% of 1% of those who do your job.
Going from being flat out busy to not being busy - means you’ve given those who rely on you the greatest gift a person can give another in a workplace:
The confidence to do business.
You’ve exerted the extra time, intelligence, energy, creativity, and risk - to go upstream and work out why the bodies are falling in - while still hauling bodies out. Because you’re doing two things: hauling and going upstream - you’re super-busy for a time. You’re going beyond what you’re paid or acknowledged for. There’s a hump.
Whether it’s through mentoring, training, harnessing technology or removing gatekeepers and unnecessary bureaucracy - you have succeeded in transferring enough of your knowledge to others that they rarely need you to do their jobs.
Explaining why nobody sets out to reach this level of not busy in their work.
Not only is it hard and takes creativity and a period of super-busy. But because not being busy looks exactly the same as someone who’s incompetent or lazy.
It puts your job in jeopardy when the boss or HR come looking to cost cut.
It makes it hard to justify why you can’t help out at your child’s school.
Removing friction from the trajectory of another’s decision making should be the objective of every worker. It’s a remarkable act of selfless service.
Especially when that friction is you.