When it comes to recruitment there is the temptation to only employ someone in your own image. Someone that thinks the same way you do, shares the same values, deals with problems in the same way and so on. For some this is just more comfortable than employing someone different and being exposed to the unpredictable outcome. After all, one person’s synergy of ideas is another person’s clash of opposites.
A proper control freak can take this one step further and not only employ people in their own image but also at an earlier point in their development – “You remind me of me when I was a …”.
That makes is so much easier to shape and control their staff. It also maintains the feelings of superiority and lack of perceived competition that some managers need, to feel secure.
If you hadn’t guessed it already, I think this is plain wrong and a sign of real insecurity. In the same way that we need bio-diversity to protect our environment, we also need idea-diversity, value-diversity, approach-diversity and so on. It might be more of a handful but it is more productive, more rewarding and most of all, more human.
jay Leadership
Back when I worked in the bureaucracy of the public sector I came across a few managers who had an odd habit when it came to communicating important things.
Because it was important they wanted to communicate it in person, but they weren’t the kind of people who would just wander over to your office and tell you. Somehow they never quite felt comfortable enough with the informality of that. It was as though important news demands a certain solemnity in the way it is conveyed, almost a bit of a ritual.
So instead they waited until their next scheduled face to face meeting. Even if that was weeks away and even if the information was really, really important.
For some of them the problem was even worse. Their failure to communicate wasn’t just because they couldn’t be informal, but they had actually decided that doing everything on a planned schedule was the best way to do it! It wouldn’t matter how important the information was, they weren’t going to mention a word of it until Thursday because that’s when our next meeting was scheduled and they could prepare for the ’solemn ritual of conveying important information’. Until then, they buried the information in their brain and wouldn’t even remember it until the alloted time.
I’m sure you can guess this drove me mad. I even started to nonchantly stroll past their office when I knew something was up and ask “heard anything interesting recently?”. Even with that prompt some of the buggers would still not tell me until the scheduled moment. Infuriating.
jay Leadership
I’ve used this analogy so often and for so many years that I almost forgot to write it down.
Imagine you are holding a long piece of thread outstretched before you. You, the leader, are on that thread and just a short way behind you are the followers. Now followers like to progress, which means they are moving along that thread towards you.
Now assuming you want to retain your position as a leader, how do you ensure that they don’t catch up. here are some wrong answers:
- Try to stop those at the back from moving forwards. Best done by holding on to things and stop the followers from taking them on.
- Try stretch yourself as wide along the piece of thread as possible. As well as holding on to things try to pick up new things as well.
But these actions inevitably lead to blockages and conflict.
If you want to move forwards then you simply have to let things go and let the followers take them up. That way you get the capacity to learn new things and so you move along the thread.
You can even be proactive about it and push things to the followers to speed up the movement. They might be reluctant to do this, but if they can see that this is progress along the thread, not some random act of management, then that nearly always works.
jay Leadership
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