Observers.
We enter the world as a participant.
Flailing and screaming and rolling, and crawling, and walking, and climbing to get involved.
Then we go to school and are trained to be observers.
Years of sitting in classrooms listening to experts reveal and reinforce our ignorance and lack of power.
Just when we think we’ve mastered something enough to participate - we’re moved to a new level of ignorance.
Then we go to work where we are in a master-servant relationship.
A few run businesses or enter politics or journalism or academia or another pursuit contributing to public debate.
The rest of us silently observe.
Until election time.
It’s About Time.
The more time you have, the better the decision you should make.
Good decisions are founded on creating time.
We create time for ourselves in several ways.
Policies are decisions made in advance. Applying a policy instead of gathering and assessing and resolving the information baked into a policy gives us time.
Experience - mine and others - that finds its way through continuous improvement processes into training or equipment or workplace structures gives us time to apply the facts before us.
Drills give us the security of a rote response to fall back on if we can’t create one in the time created by knowing drills.
Time invested in developing relationships pays off when we must pass off part of a decision or its execution.
Delegation frees us up to focus on decisions demanding our full attention.
Managing time expectations in those affected by our decision gives us time to assess the information and consider more options.
The successful ‘split second decision’ is either based on luck - or the unconscious experience built over time.
Team Player.
If you tell me I’m on your team - and you don’t do your bit as you promised.
Then I just look stupid.
With all the potential consequences that follow.
Including you telling me I’m not on your team.
New Church.
Workplaces and their HR Manual are the modern Churches and Bible for teaching values and ethics in relationships.
Force Multipliers.
Good policies are like glasses for the short sighted.
Like step ladders for the short of stature.
Like noise cancelling headphones.
They allow us to focus on our strengths and see beyond constraints lying outside our experience and expertise.
Good policies are force multipliers.
Reconnaissance.
A good book is a scout reporting in from reconnoitring the terrain of your potential futures.
Purity.
There’s a purity about being a consultant compared to an employee.
An employee turns up to a desk each day hoping to be engaged by work while their employer feels compelled to give them work of any kind - engaging or not.
A client only chooses a consultant when they know what, when, why, how, and how much.
And that the consultant fits all five.
Like a hand in a glove
Voyeur.
The Law is beautiful.
I marvel at the lucid, elegant lines of a well-written judgment.
The flow of reason and logic.
The appropriately blend of legal language and colourful turns of phrase.
Some the judge’s own - some borrowed from counsel’s palette.
I have this luxury of the voyeur.
I am like the art connoisseur roaming the gallery floor.
I am not the barrister artist - covered in paint splatters and reeking with the smell of turpentine with discarded canvases and upturned paint tins strewn around their chaotic studio.
Averted Vision.
The way the rods and cones in our eyes work means we see an object in the dark better by looking slightly either side of it.
This technique is called ‘averted vision’.
The way our workplaces work means we see the boss better by looking at the people either side of them.
Absenteeism. Turnover. Punctuality. Demeanour. Participation. Illness. Transfers.
Or we may choose to be wilfully blind.
The World Waits.
We speak and write and think and judge (ourselves and others) with the voice and words and rules of another.
A parent, a long ago teacher, a boss, or a corporate guru.
While our heart waits in the wings.
And the world waits for us.
Solo Fight.
If we don’t confront our fears, uncertainties, and self-doubts and wrestle with them - they will turn on those around us in the form of our damaging behaviours - and hold them hostage.
The ransom those emotions demand of us is that we fight them solo.
Every day.
Reinforced.
Bad bosses’ bad behaviour is reinforced because a bad boss assumes when everything works it it was because of their behaviour.
Not in spite of it.
We Revise.
We spend each day revising the draft we prepared the night before.
Publishing as our head hits the pillow.
Manipulation.
We hate being manipulated.
And thus we tell ourselves workplace stories.
‘I have a mortgage’. ‘I need that next promotion.’ ‘Once I finish my part time studies I’m out of here.’
Each story softens the humiliation.
Creativity & The Bad Boss.
A bad boss suppresses, deters, and even punishes creativity, innovation, imagination, and invention.
There are two reasons.
First, the bad boss has not practised any of these and therefore sees no value in them.
Second, the bad boss is invested in the status quo.
Change is a threat to the bad boss.
A Tell-Tale Sign.
A tell-tale sign that someone is not ready to manage or lead is their emphasis on personalities rather than issues.
Stepping up to the job of harnessing people and systems means having the skill and discipline to identify and harness the capability of collective capacity.
Whether a sporting coach or captain, a community leader, or a boss - we must leave behind our habit of judging people’s personality. We must cease being a pundit of the politics of relationships and trading in inside information. We must think of the sum total of the people we must direct, manage, or lead.
In your next meeting, listen to the way participants talk about other people. Do they rely on inside information about individual personalities? Do they amplify their personal histories, relationships, or networks? Do they stereotype them as ‘academics’ or ‘novices’ or ‘young’ or ‘old’ or ‘of another tribe’? Do they deploy pop psychology or ‘ my sister used to work with them’? These are the traits of people who lack the confidence and wisdom to seek out the potential in others. To get to know what they can contribute to a task or goal.
These are people unfit to lead.