AnnMaria's Blog

Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a good book with some pretty good advice. However, I think some people have missed the point.

One story in particular stuck with me, it was about a man who complained that no matter what he said, his wife was always worried that he was cheating on her when he was out of town. His job required travel and he wanted Dr. Covey to tell him what he could say to his wife. In their discussion, it turned out that he had met his wife while on a business trip when he was married to his first wife. They had an affair, he divorced and married his current wife. Covey's advice was priceless. He said,

"You can't talk yourself out of problems you behave your way into."

I know a manager who has read all the books. She does all of the things that Dr. Longie talks about in his ethics course. She makes sure that her new employees get an orientation when different co-workers are assigned to take the new person to lunch, explain different parts of the organization. Each person has a written job description and a semi-annual evaluation. She makes it a point to stop and speak to each of her employees on  a regular basis.

However ... it is all a complete fraud. The first time or two the employee might be fooled into having a conversation, but after a few minutes, the manager is visibly impatient to be on her way. Soon, they learn to just say hello and make a comment about the weather or the local sports team, and then she is on her way to "talk" to the next employee.

The evaluation forms are designed exactly like Dr. Longie recommends, with measurable goals, a meeting with the supervisor to discuss these, regular meetings for 'monitoring' with written follow-up. The problem is that those employees who meet their goals and those who consistently fail at them receive the exact same response - none. No one loses their job. Everyone gets the same raise each year. Promotions are given to whoever the manager feels most comfortable working with, regardless of performance.

On paper, this manager looks like the most ethical, competent person around, but she is just going through the motions.

It reminded me of a saying an old coach of mine used to have,

"It's all about the want-to ."

He said you could give an athlete all the skills in the world, you could train until the cows came home but in the end of a match, it all came down to did that athlete really want to win badly enough to pour heart and soul into it.

This manager has good technique, but the truth is that she doesn't really care about her employees. She cares about herself getting ahead and has down pat all the techniques to appear to be an ethical manager, but it isn't working for her.

Because you can't talk yourself out of problems you behave yourself into.

"Commitment from the top is very important on this because this is what sets the tone of the company." Furthermore, he warns that if the commitment by top management isn't genuine, then an ethics program will not succeed. "If there's the slightest indication of cynicism on the part of top management," he cautions, "then it's all over."

This extremely true statement can be found about two-thirds of the way through the page from the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University, then the author goes on to another topic. Points for Dr. White for bringing this issue up, he is one of the few. However, he joins everyone else in the world in not giving this crucial fact nearly as much attention as it deserves.

If honest commitment to an ethics program is such a key point, and I agree that it is, why doesn't every consultant, every book, begin with that? My guess is that if they did that they would get a lot fewer payments from upper management. Almost everyone seems to want to believe that he or she is the most ethical person in the room, so no consultant wants to risk a large fee telling the director that if an ethics program fails it is probably his or her fault. In fact. while I hear managers and board members say that, as the people in charge, they take full responsibility, I am pretty sure they are thinking to themselves,

"I am smart and ethical and if the people working under me were not such bozos none of this bad stuff would have happened."

It's very interesting that the exact company mentioned in the case study by Dr. White is General Dynamics, which, in 1985 was found guilty of some not just unethical but criminal practices which resulted in members of senior management being indicted and the company suspended from federal contracting, not once, but twice. It's interesting because I used to work for General Dynamics and I left there in 1985.

I'd be very curious to know how this whole wonderful ethics program supposedly worked out with all of the same people there. I left, just coincidentally, because I was getting married, moving to another city and starting graduate school. There was no mass exodus of people from the company.  So, although the studies I read, written by consultants and professors at universities that would like to get donations suggest that the program has been successful, I remain skeptical.

A handful of senior managers did not defraud the government of hundreds of millions of dollars all by themselves. Hundreds of people knew about it, or at least suspected it. I was just a new, young engineer and I heard people voicing their suspicions. Many of the older managers joked about the over-charging and charging to the wrong contract. I am pretty good with computers (remember this was before Excel existed) and when I ran through some numbers and mentioned what I had discovered to management (what you're supposed to do, right?) only one person was shocked and surprised. He took it to his boss, he told him to drop it. He quit the company on the spot. I ended up married to that man, by the way.

So, now, all of a sudden a new "Vice-president for Ethics" is appointed and all of those people who looked the other way are now completely honest and ethical.

Excuse me for being skeptical.

I have worked on reservations since 1990 - that's twenty years of teaching, consulting, working as an evaluator, grantwriter. That certainly doesn't make me an Indian but it means that I can see b.s. most of the time - as in some people may have been discriminated against but other people didn't get their grant renewed because they wrote a terrible proposal, putting in half the time that would have been required and ignoring the instructions. (Hint: The federal government is pretty anal-retentive about people following instructions.)

It also means I have seen both the good and the bad. Over the past couple of decades I have seen more and more people getting higher education, including graduate degrees, and that is good. There seem to be more people getting professional jobs off the reservation, and then coming back home to work, bringing their skills with them. That is good, too.

Lately, a lot of "management expertise" is being promoted in the workplace and that can be both good and bad. Understanding balance sheets, standard accounting principles, all of that is not only good but it keeps you out of federal prison for misuse of funds.

HOWEVER, some of the latest management gurus I think just are not worth listening to. On this score, I may differ from Dr. Longie.

I get really fed up with those articles about delegation, for example, that tell managers they need to delegate repetitive tasks, detail work, information gathering and attending meetings because they need to save their valuable time. Native Americans of a great many tribes are rightfully known for their generosity. There are over 400 federally recognized tribes so there may be some known for their stinginess.  I can only say that I haven't encountered them.

This generosity takes many forms. One is giving of attention, treating each person's opinion as worthy of notice. As Erich has pointed out many times in his courses, a major difference between Sitting Bull and Custer styles of leadership is equal treatment. While Sitting Bull definitely led the Battle of Little Big Horn there is nothing to suggest that he believed he was superior to his people. Quite the opposite, he slept where they slept, ate what they ate. This lack of a rigid hierarchy is another quality I consider positive in many tribal organizations and why I have enjoyed working with them.

In keeping with these traditions, I would suggest that really effective delegation should help your employees as much as you. Tasks which are repetitive to you may be completely new to a less experienced employee. Being trained on something with a set procedure may allow that person to learn new skills, succeed and gain confidence. Sending an employee to a meeting in your place should also give that person a chance to meet other managers and get recognized for his or her knowledge, get experience running a meeting or in public speaking.

I am starting to think this more and more -  management strategies without ethics like generosity and honesty are not effective. More often, employees will see right through you, no matter how many management books you cite.

Too many managers act as if they and their workers aren't the same species. They employ expensive consultants (hey, that's us!) to tell them how to motivate their employees - praise, support, involvement, autonomy. What makes them think that the people who work for them are so different from themselves?

In the book, The Genius of Sitting Bull, the authors point to one of Sitting Bull's strengths as a leader, that he lived among his people. He knew exactly how ready his troops were to attack. He ate what they ate, slept where they slept. Living among them, he also had the same information they had. Custer, apart from his men and disdaining to listen to information from scouts was fatally uninformed.

Today, I walked through a building where the managers all have offices while their workers are in cubicles, some of them no more than a desk with a few inches of "wall" on each side. The managers have nice oak or cherry furniture while their workers have prison-grey steel desks and bookcases. I am sure this saved the organization a lot of money. Everyone is expected to work exactly eight hours a day and the lowest level employees are even required to ask their supervisors if they want to use the restroom. I asked someone, who was a very competent worker who had been there for years, to help me. As we passed his boss, he stopped briefly to explain why he was away from his desk helping me, a client !

In the tribal managers course, Dr. Longie quotes management researchers who stress the importance of "autonomy, support, recognition" in motivating employees. The managers I walked past today would argue they do all of those things. In fact, the very employee who was helping me had a certificate in his cubicle recognizing him as a "team player" or something.

As my children would say - I call bull shit on you.

Honestly, if you are a manager, you have designer furniture in your office while your staff are working with no privacy and you give them a ten-cent piece of paper you printed out on your printer as "recognition" and email them "atta-boy" three times a month - are you any different than Custer who referred to his men as "cattle"?

If you are a manager, take this quick quiz:
1. Name three people who work for you.
2. Now name three people who work for THEM who are doing a good job.
3. For each of those people list what is important to that person. What does he or she really like about the job? What does that person dislike the most?

I know a person who is head of an organization of about 300 people and very proud of the fact that he knows the name of every person working for him. What the hell difference does that make? This same person doesn't have a clue about the problems his employees face because he seldom leaves his office unless it is to meet with others at "his level", accompanied by one or two of his favorite employees who are constantly gushing about his brilliance and hands on approach. As you might guess, he has a very big, very nice office.

If you have an open door policy, how many people who are two or more levels below you in the organization ever actually walked through your door, sat down and talked to you about anything? Why not?

Often, I think the Spirit Lake Consulting courses should be renamed. "Ethics" makes me think of philosophers discussing what Aristotle said about - well, something - I have to admit I never read very far in those discussions.

Character is a better description to me of what the Tribal Leaders Institute is about, doing the right thing every day to the best of our abilities. One "pillar of character" is perseverance. Josephson discusses this under "responsibility".

As a board member, you need a thick skin. The more involved you are on a board, as chair of a committee, on an executive committee or president, the thicker skin you are going to need. It may seem unfair - in fact, it probably IS unfair - that the more work you do the more criticism you will attract. Very, very few decisions will be appreciated by everyone. It may happen that a person has a completely wrong reason for criticizing you. The Director of the After-School program continually came in drunk. Last week, he was found passed out on the floor by two of the kindergarten students. So, you fired him.

Today, everyone is getting a note from a fellow board member saying that you don't care about youth because you have no children of your own, that money only goes to the elder programs because your mother needs assistance, and proof of how uncaring you are is that you cut off $60,000 in funding for the after school program.

The $60,000 happens to be the line item for the director who is the board member's brother. Your only child died seven years ago and your mother is in poor health. How could someone be so hurtful as to bring this up?

When you confront the board member she says,
"I am only telling the community the truth. You did vote for money for more programs for the elderly. I am sure you are concerned about your mother but that doesn't make it okay for you o cut funding for youth programs. Joe being my brother has nothing to do with it. I am just doing my responsibility as a board member to let people know the truth."

How do you deal with situations like this? Four answers that have worked for me:

1. Be prepared. Realize this will happen again and again. Persevere. Remind yourself every day that perseverance is needed as a board member.
2. Generosity. Try to consider whether the other person does have a point. Do you focus more on elderly programs? Is there a need for more funding for the youth programs? Have they been neglected.
3. Don't take anything personally. This is often hard for me, but as I make a deliberate effort at it I am getting better. Those same people who are complaining about your actions would complain if someone else had made the same decision. When people are running you down it says more about them than about you and most people realize that. However, some people will believe the critics. Don't take that personally either.
4. Take heart from people who are better than you. This one works for me a lot. I look at people who have survived and excelled in so much greater challenges than I do. Senator Max Cleland is one such example. After losing three limbs during a battle in Vietnam he went on to become a senator and spend a career in public service. Erich often discusses role models in Native American history, such as Sitting Bull. The tribal leaders wiki has articles added on more contemporary leaders, such as Wilma Mankiller. Whether it is President Obama or Tillie Black Bear, most of us don't need to look very far to find someone who has devoted ar more to public service than we have and be far more unfairly criticized. There is value in both learning from those role models how to handle adversity and in realizing how petty our own personal issues usually are.