Author Archives: Gregory Burns, MA, LMFT, LPCC

Re-Orgs Should Follow the Rules of Basketball, Not Baseball

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A deep assumption that drives maladaptive behavior and bad business decisions in managers is that the organization plays by the substitution rules of baseball (or world football). Once you are taken out of the game, you are permanently out. This belief causes a manager to have an overly self-invested view of his or her charter. Your product or technology – as currently organized – becomes the most important thing on earth! If your career is, in effect, tied to that belief, then it is actually a matter of personal survival, and you start to sound to others like a turf-protecting, near-sighted self-promoter.

During a re-org, we use language like “who’s out.” When “out” equals irrelevance forever, the re-org is no longer about adapting to technology and the business, but entirely about personal winners and losers. Such a mindset can drag down the morale of the entire organization.

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Stars on the Bench

Under the rules of basketball (hockey, North American football), free substitution is permitted and expected. Even the stars go to the bench once in a while. Players (managers) go into the game according to the situation and their unique strengths, or sometimes just to give others a rest. Most importantly, they fully expect to go back into the game, maybe even in a somewhat different position/role. Versatility is highly valued. Some players even signal that they need to come out of the game temporarily. At that point the blinders are off and you are free and trusted to make the best decisions for the business and the larger group.

Leader as Servant

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Christ_washes_apostles'_feet_(Monreale)Leadership is very ego inflationary and needs to be consciously regulated or it will get out of control. The most ego-centric organizational leader focuses attention directly and exclusively on HIS/HER charter or mandate. If the charter succeeds (defined by some combination of perception and metrics) then I succeed. The staff who report to ME is the force at MY disposal to accomplish MY charter. I complain when my force is too small for MY charter and seek more charter when I have, or can obtain, extra force. Given these concerns, I mostly manage laterally and upward. I address MY force when I want to exercise MY power – either to reshape them or change their direction.

In servant leadership, also called “leading from behind,” the charter belongs to the team and the leader tries to help every person on that team do the best possible job, knowing that the indirect result will be a productive and creative charter. Providing individual help (leadership, counsel, mentoring, advocacy, assessment, development) means knowing each person as an individual human being, striving on a career path woven into a much larger life path. This service must be rendered, obviously, to all direct reports, but also all 2nd level reports and randomly after that. A legendary football coach once said, “You win with people.” Not force, or headcount, but a team of individuals with names, hopes, fears and desires. The servant leader willingly puts his fate as an individual into the team that he has coached and nurtured.

The 3 Scripts of Difficult Co-Workers

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comfortDifficult co-workers are running their “programs for comfort” (to paraphrase Thomas Keating) with too much priority. We are all running one of these “daemons,” but in the best case, they share urgency with the classic, cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and courage. Keating identifies the daemons as 1) safety and security, 2) power and control, and 3) affection and esteem. They define our comfort zones everywhere, but especially at work where our egos typically have the most to gain and the most to lose.

Each program aims to get a legitimate need met, but when that need has not historically been addressed, a debt can build up and the payments can be steep – hence the increased urgency. Those running safety-and-security want everything to stay the same. New proposals threaten them. The power-and-control people need to keep everything in front of them and moving slow enough so that they can either buy in or make changes. Exercising power reminds them that they exist and they matter. Affection-and-esteem folks frequently need to be reminded that they are worthy and good, and so will go out of their way to engineer or claim a stake in favorable moments.

Yes, all of these people are terribly ego-centric, but only because they do not have a strong, resilient and confident ego in the first place – just the opposite of what you might expect! When seen as maladaptive attempts to self-comfort, these programs can evoke compassion from those whose comfort is more deeply installed.

Compassion for Difficult Co-Workers

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Why is that co-worker so … (obstinate, devious, boastful, greedy, aggressive, et cetera)? The question is usually posed at the water cooler and is rhetorical, meant to solicit an affirmation of your judgment (“I must be right in thinking that so and so is bad because my friends agree”). Gossip is not so much about telling secrets as it is about group reassurance. But why, really, is that person behaving in a way that seems dysfunctional for the larger team and/or the business?

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Depression, anxiety and stress are obvious possibilities. A legitimate personality disorder is a more difficult burden. Ruling those out, what is up with the normal neurotic (i.e. everybody and anybody)?

All of us are striving to be relevant and effective while staying within our comfort zones. This struggle is played out with the highest stakes in the workplace, the milieu in which we are applying our highest, most valuable skills. At the job is where our self-esteem and our very identities are on the line. I suspect that the more advanced you are in a trade or a profession, the more this is true. The business and teamwork are nice but I’ve got to prove that I matter! Otherwise I don’t have a meaningful narrative for my existence, which everybody needs.

When you observe your co-worker being difficult, get out your compassion heart-lens and see the person in a desperate struggle to matter. Win your victories with humility and never induce shame in your rivals.

Layoff as a Wake-Up

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1909_Tyee_-_Faculty_FootFew careers follow a linear path of ascent until some self-selected retirement age, whereupon leisure compensates for any hardship or drudgery one had to endure along the way. Whether it is a layoff or a related interrupt (re-org, re-assignment, loss of responsibility, dismissal), your run of success likely will not last. Any number of personal shifts or environmental conditions can throw you out of your saddle. Perhaps the most insidious precipitant is that your long-followed path (profession, field, domain, goal) no longer has the same meaning for you. You even want to volunteer for the layoff.

Failure, great suffering and the crises of meaning are the only high priority, non-maskable events that have the power to interrupt your current program for happiness (likely a fairly tight loop) and get you to start experiencing in a greater context and considering a larger meaning. When and if this happens to you, do not waste the moment in resentment or assigning blame. You have the invitation, even the demand, to stand back and self-assess. How can you be more fully human? Have you been ignoring any of your other gifts? “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver).

Priests and Prophets in Corporate Leadership

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Zacharias (Michelangelo)

A wise manager – who is only wise because he learned from outside as well as inside his field – gave me this memorable parallel between corporate and religious leadership. People “of the Book” (Jews, Christians, Muslims) are all familiar with the history of the prophets. They critique the system from within, though from the margins of the organization. Prophets do not predict the future in detail but call out trends, disruptions, downward slides and divergence from core values. They see a higher ideal, a higher level of group consciousness. An organization with no capacity or tolerance for self-criticism will blindly march toward irrelevance or extinction.

But prophets are rarely popular within their organization. They do not win mass conversions and in biblical times they usually ended up dead (now retired, fired, transferred, sidelined, etc.) (Mark 6:4). They face the priesthood, whose job it is to justify and perpetuate the system. Priests provide continuity, policies (dogma), procedures (rituals) that allow the organization to join forces and move as one; they embody and give voice to the company. Every organization is self-justifying and self-perpetuating, just like every organism. Criticize it and the priests will circle the wagons. This is just normal reactivity, not some kind of evil.

Priests have a much longer life expectancy than prophets in corporate leadership. Know which one you are before you invest too much in that career path.