by Charles Plant | Sep 13, 2013 | Leadership Development
If you were James Dyson’s boss, would you have fired him before he created his 5,127th prototype of a new vacuum cleaner?
I’ve been trying to figure out why employees have become so fearful of making mistakes and I think the cause is what I’ve called ‘Float and Dive Management’.
Since there is no longer enough time to be a micro-manager, people have become ‘Float and Dive’ Managers. Employees are ignored for a long time but at some time the manager dives in, creates a flurry of activity, finds a bunch of problems, becomes irritated, bawls out the employee for his failures and retreats back into float mode.
The poor employee, having become traumatized by the Dive, never knows when it’s going to happen again, and lives in daily fear of another Dive.
A non Float and Dive Manager would see what’s happening all the time, recognize that errors are part of the daily routine and not freak out over small ones.
Back to James Dyson. 14 years and 5,126 errors till he got it right.When would you have fired him?
by Charles Plant | Sep 10, 2013 | Leadership Development
I hope you’ve been keeping up with 40 Days of Dating. It’s a very bad example of the lack of tolerance we have for others these days. If you haven’t been reading the blog, It’s the current new media darling where two good friends with opposite relationship problems who found themselves single at the same time agree to date for 40 days and blog about it.
What astounded me the most in reading it daily was how little tolerance each had for the other’s foibles. Either of them can get their nose out of joint if the other wears the wrong thing, eats too much, says the wrong thing, reacts the wrong way, even looks the wrong way.
It’s almost as if they are trying to doom the relationship from the start by expecting perfection.
Now I’m not trying to turn this blog into something about dating but the parallels to the working world are astounding. We have become much too intolerant of mistakes made by others.
The world of Six Sigma has made us jump on the smallest mistake so that many at work are now paralyzed by fear, concerned that they’ll make some minor error and be raked over the coals for it.
It has become a cultural phenomenon to point out imperfection. When Apple brings out their newest iPhone later today, watch for all the criticism they get. No matter what they do, the tech paparazzi will be all over the failings of whatever they do.
What concerns me most is where this will end. How bad with this lack of tolerance get before the pendulum inevitably starts moving back?
by Charles Plant | Sep 9, 2013 | Leadership Development
Ok, here we go again with the big confessions. I am a language bully. There, I’m glad I got that off my back. I’m hoping a new chapter of LBA (Language Bullies Anonymous) will open up in my neighbourhood as bullying is something up with which I shall not put.
For years I have corrected people who end their sentences with prepositions. I have pronounced ‘schedule’ with a soft ‘ch’, the way it should be pronounced. I take pride that when I say tissue or issue it sounds like i’m using a real ‘s’ instead of an ‘sh.’ Tuesday sounds exotic.
These are immaterial things but symptoms of a bigger problem, and that problem is an inability to tolerate mistakes in others. For some reason I have an innate desire to correct people when they make mistakes. (You should hear my son and I when we get together and attempt to out-correct each other.)
Part of being a leader is tolerating honest mistakes as learning experiences. While I seem to be able to do this on larger scale issues, (please imagine how I would have said that word), I become very pedantic regarding immaterial errors. I must drive people nuts.
We have weeks throughout the year dedicated to special issues such as National Love Your Dog Week. I think we should have a week called ‘Just Let It Go Week.’ We could all practice not being irritated by things which in the grand scheme of things are not material. And we could practice tolerance in the failures of others.
by Charles Plant | Sep 6, 2013 | Literature Review
The end of a short week is here and I have one last book for you to read. (You must be glad this week wasn’t a day longer as you would have had one more book.) I realize the last three were a bit heavy so I’ve selected something light.
Many years ago, when looking for a new entrepreneurial venture after Synamics was over, I came across a book called The Monk and The Riddle by Randy Komisar. It influenced me in a way I didn’t expect and made it very difficult for me to pick my next entrepreneurial adventure.
The book asks the question, what would you be willing to do for the rest of your life? Easy question, hard to answer.
So go read the book and try to answer the question.
And there it is, four days, four books. One practical and useful, one revealing, one heavy, and one thought provoking. That’s it for your reading assignment for this term Have a good one.
by Charles Plant | Sep 5, 2013 | Leadership Development, Literature Review
I would be remiss if I did not include at least one Peter Drucker book in your reading list. For today’s book I have reached back into the depths of time and recommended The Practice of Management which Drucker wrote in 1954.
I once gave this book to a new manager and was asked why on earth I was giving out a book that at the time was over 40 years old. The reason I keep going back to it is that it’s a classic.
It was the first book that looked at management as a discipline and saw a manager’s job as something distinct from the other jobs in an organization. Every book written after is just taking a tangent on this, the first of a genre.
Now if you like you can cheat by reading The Essential Drucker or Management instead, both more modern takes on the same theme.
