The way business is done hasn't changed much since about 1850. In way too many of our organizations - nonprofit and for-profit alike - there is still the equivalent of the cigar-chomping, corner-office-dwelling, big guy with the biggest salary who gets to have the biggest voice. The guy might not actually be a guy today, although most still are. But you get the picture.
There are notable exceptions to the rule - places where the CEO or the Senior Pastor has the same size cubicle as anybody else and shoots hoops with the team at lunch and actually wants to know what people at every level in the organization have to say - but most businesses, nonprofit organizations, and even religious institutions are still run from the top-down. This might have been useful and maybe even unavoidable back in the day when those first industrialists were first learning how to spit automobiles off an assembly line. But it's a brand new day. And although the way people work together might not have changed very much, the way people think about themselves has changed...a lot.
Maybe it's the influence the internet has had and the way it gives everybody who wants one a platform to speak his or her mind about whatever happens to be on it. Maybe it's been the several decades long evolution of civil rights and the growing sense that everyone really does have a certain inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Or maybe it's just been too many examples of leaders who were born (o, let's just say...) with silver spurs on his boots, who only got into the best schools because of the shine of his family name, and who grew up to make what seemed like a huge mess out of almost everything he touched.
We're not exactly sure why it is.
But we do know this: People today expect their voices to be heard. They want their input, insights, and ideas to be taken seriously. They believe their intelligence, creativity, and passions ought to be put to good use. They want their work - and their lives - to matter.
And it ticks them off when those things don't happen. It makes 'em madder than a tomboy who gets left out because the captains in charge of picking sides said nobody'd play against a girl.
Want proof? Look at the 3 Maligned Mice, the blinded-by-their-own-arrogance CEO's who jetted to DC on their personal planes yesterday to ask for a handout from the taxpayers to bail themselves out of the mess they've made in Detroit. Even their supporters couldn't fix this one. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Sen. Reid, who entered the week hoping to secure aid for the industry, took a swipe at the Big Three. "What happened here in Washington this week has not been good for the auto industry," he said. "I know it wasn't planned, but these guys flying in their big corporate jets doesn't send a good message to people in Searchlight, Nevada, or Las Vegas, or Reno, or any other place in this country."
Well, duh.
The truth is, people in this country didn't like those guys to begin with. And all they did yesterday was confirm what folks already thought. The people in charge today - of our workplaces, schools, hospitals, NGO's, government agencies, and religious institutions - might be a little smarter than the average bear (at least about some things) but not enough to deserve a salary or an office or a voice or a cigar, for that matter, so much bigger than everybody else's.
The truth is, there is a toxic mess to be cleaned up in most of the organizations we're a part of. People are mad. Or, even worse, they're beyond mad to the point of not caring one way or another.
What's a leader to do?
You can start by selling the jet. But it goes deeper than that. You've got to stop taking yourself so seriously so that you can take the purpose - and the people - of your organization more seriously. You've got to stop pretending that you can muster up enough enthusiasm or evidence to get people to go where you want them to go. You've gotta ask them what they think and get them involved, really and deeply involved, in wondering with you about the why and the what and the how of your work together. You have to respect them enough to believe that, although no one of you has all the answers, you can figure them out together if you're willing to start asking the right questions. You need to have fun with them, so they know you mean it when you invite them to risk being creative and encourage them to dream and give them space to experiment with new ways of doing things. You need to get over yourself.
We're not the first ones to say so. Tom Malone said it in The Future Of Work. Meg Wheatley has been talking about it for years. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have used the spider and a starfish to give us an unforgettable analogy to think about it. And Jesus said it a couple of thousand years ago when he announced that the first would be last and the last would be first and warned leaders that they would first have to learn to serve. It's time to do something new. We believe it's time to learn what it means to be renewable. The way we've always done things isn't working.
Just ask the mice.
For another perspective on the Big 3, check out Seth's Blog today.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/what-to-do-abou.html
Posted by: kelly fryer | November 21, 2008 at 12:35 PM