The Price.
Our beliefs are often secured at the price of Truth.
Our status is often secured at the price of someone else’s.
The Shadow People.
Who really holds all the power in any organisation?
It’s not the bosses or managers so-called leaders.
It’s:
The critics.
The cynics.
The insecure.
The hypocrites.
The sycophants.
The shadow people.
Know This.
Know this.
If you truly seek ‘Leadership’.
If you’re absolutely positively sure you want to ‘Lead’.
If you think you’re ready to be a ‘Leader’.
Then be prepared for:
Criticism.
Resistance from all quarters.
Loneliness.
Self-doubt.
Betrayal.
Failure.
You will fail against all the worldly measures of success.
So best you have your own.
Hiking Up the Mountain.
Hiking up the mountain, the world whispers:
‘Pause! Look!’
But you’re busy hiking up the mountain.
Hiking up the mountain, you lose your footing, and the world whispers:
‘Look around you!’
But you regain your composure and resume hiking up the mountain.
Hiking up the mountain, a dislodged boulder knocks you down and leaves you concussed.
You sit up, and look around you, your head aching.
You have to get to the top of the mountain.
It’s even more of an achievement after being struck by a rock.
You climb the mountain partly because it’s hard.
‘I was even struck by a small landslide,’ you tell your admiring friends and family afterwards.
The summit was sweeter and the view more magnificent because a rock hit you on the way up.
Censorship.
When you choose your job, you choose how much of yourself you are willing to censor.
Storyteller.
The person we call ‘leader’ or ‘boss’ is the person we entrust as organisation or workplace storyteller.
We surrender to them the job of interpreting the random events and disconnected decisions in our workplace.
The storyteller says ‘This good stuff happened because I was in charge and the bits that went wrong were someone else’s fault.’
We accept they will make themselves the hero of the story.
We hope for more than a cameo.
One Decision.
Being a good person only requires one decision:
Choose to be good to others.
Every action that follows is measured against that decision rather than a decision itself.
Are we there yet?
The Right Thing.
I drive on one side of the road and you drive on the other.
We take for granted the mutual understandings and cooperation and rules allowing our society to function cohesively.
Each day we enter into thousands of unwritten and unenforceable contracts with loved ones and strangers.
If someone swerves onto my side and we collide - there are avenues of redress and restoration for my loss.
But what happens when the boss doesn’t follow the rules?
Not enough to trigger avenues of industrial redress but sufficiently damaging to put a ding or scratch in my wellbeing.
What happens when an organisation doesn’t behave as promised?
It’s not until this happens that we realise with some shock and disorientation - there is very little we can do about it.
Too petty and burdensome and even risky to engage the machinery of any legal process, assuming one exists.
But significant enough to dent our trust and sense of how the world operates.
Our lives and society depend - to a degree we rarely appreciate - on other people doing the right thing
Easy to be a Bad Boss.
It’s so much easier to be a bad boss than a good one.
A good boss understands their sources of authority are external, and must be referred to and honoured.
A bad boss is their own source of authority and therefore if left is right and black is white - then thus it is so.
A bad boss defers to an external source of authority only to the extent it is consistent with their opinion.
A bad boss bends the universe towards their whims.
Cheered on by their enablers and blessed by those who benefit from the bad boss’s narcissism.
Simulation.
Some bosses, managers, and workplaces run simulations of what they think bossing, managing, and working look like.
A pantomime performance amidst which workers try to work.
Director of First Impressions.
You can tell almost all you need to know about a workplace from the receptionist’s greeting.
Just Like You and Me.
He dreams absurd stories while snoring.
Wakes with bad breath and his pyjamas askew.
Pulls on his pants one leg at a time.
Nudges his car with four wheels in a queue with all the morning traffic.
Has no idea how his accelerator works.
Sings the wrong lyrics out of tune to the breakfast radio station.
Remembers he forgot his sister-in-law’s birthday.
Pulls into his reserved parking bay, turns off the ignition, and passes wind.
Just like you and me.
Except for the reserved parking bay.
And that for the next eight hours we who also snore and fart will defer to his every utterance and crave his favour and basically lie about how we truly think and feel and desire and allow ourselves and our families to soar or sink on his judgement of us.
All because another who crawls along in the morning traffic and brushes their teeth made him the boss.
No Such Thing As Suddenly.
Workers don’t suddenly commit fraud.
Don’t suddenly bully someone.
Don’t suddenly suicide.
Long before crime, misconduct or tragedy strike an organisation- there are dozens of tiny harmful behaviours ignored, accepted, normalised or institutionalised that are too mundane to justify the response that follows a death.
Every inquiry-worth event is preceded by hundreds of micro events deemed not worth the effort to address.
Which Step?
Which step in a hike is the most important?
Which step could have been omitted?
Which step got you the furtherest?
Which step got you to your destination?
Which step did you owe to your mother?
Father?
A teacher?
