Читать книгу Cracking the Leadership Code - Alain Hunkins - Страница 22

Progress, far from consisting [of] change, depends on retentiveness… Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

How did we get here?

How did we get to the point that employees have such low confidence in their leaders? How is it that more than half of employees don't trust their colleagues, leaders, and companies? Why do we have such a failure of credibility? How did we wind up with such a crisis of leadership? Consider the following story:

A young woman decides to host a holiday dinner party in her own apartment for the very first time.

She's planning to cook her family's traditional meal: a holiday roast. The recipe has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations.

She buys all the ingredients and looks over the recipe. She notices something a bit odd. The last step of the recipe says, “Cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven.”

This makes no sense to her. So, she calls up her mother.

“Mom, I'm cooking the family holiday roast, and the recipe says to cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven. I didn't know you're supposed to do that. Why do you do that?”

Her mother replies, “That's a great question. You know, I don't really know. That's the way my mom taught it to me. Why don't you ask grandma?”

So the young woman calls her grandmother and asks the same question about the roast. Her grandma answers, “I don't know. That's the way my mom taught me. Why don't you ask her why?”

The young woman's great-grandmother is 94 years old but still has all her faculties about her. The young woman calls her up.

“Great-grandma, I'm making the family traditional holiday roast for the first time. The recipe says that you should cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven. I asked my mother why you do that, and she didn't know, so I asked grandma, and she didn't know, so that's why I'm calling you. Why do you cut the end off the roast?”

After a long pause, there's a sigh on the far end of the phone line.

“We had a small oven.”

I've shared this story with countless groups over the years. It always gets a huge laugh, because the absurdity is all too familiar. People know what it's like to work at organizations suffering from “small-oven thinking.” So many aspects of their workplace don't make sense, and yet, just like the mom and the grandma in the story, they keep doing things the same way. Questioning the past is too risky. It's safer to keep doing things the way they've always been done.

Ultimately, the reason companies behave in a small-oven manner is that their leaders have a small-oven mind-set. They have a built-in immunity to change. As Lisa Bodell, CEO of Futurethink, an innovation consultancy, says, “The only thing more resistant to change than a human being is a company.”

Caught up in the pressure to constantly produce, many of today's leaders don't take time to stop and question their own methods. It's all action, no reflection. When it comes to how they lead, they do what they do because that's the way it was always done. Yet, isn't doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result the definition of insanity?

The nature of the workplace has radically transformed over the past 30 years. These changes didn't happen overnight. There was no blaring of trumpets or great dramatic flourishes pronouncing that a new era of work had arrived. It crept in slowly, one day at a time. And as the weeks and months and years passed, our work world has been irrevocably altered.

Consider, for example, the number of business communication interactions the average executive takes part in. In the 1970s, it was about 1,000 a year. Today, it's more than 30,000 a year.¹ This tidal wave of information has dramatically changed the skills leaders need to function effectively today.

Maria, an executive vice president for a luxury retailer, describes it this way:

I was hired to head up marketing for this company. But do you know what my real job title is? I'm an email-processing machine. On an average day, I get 300 emails in my inbox. I'm not talking spam or junk or company-wide CCs. Three hundred items that clamor for my attention.

And of course I can't really give my full attention to these items because I'm booked into back-to-back meetings all day long. Most days, I get excited for 6:00 p.m. to come, because then I can get some of my actual work done. Look, if I'm really honest, in the constant hustle, things are slipping through the cracks. There's just too much to do on the to-do list. For one thing, I'm not spending enough time developing my team. Something's going to give. I'm just not sure what it is.

In addition to having to process more information, the boundaries between work and “life” are disappearing. People are working longer and harder than ever. A recent study found that although the 40-hour week is generally accepted as “normal,” adults employed full-time have reported working an average of 47 hours each week.² They're also expected to check in more frequently: nights, weekends, and vacations. A survey of employed email users finds that 22% are expected to respond to work emails when they're not at work.³

Jasmine, a middle manager at a technology company, explains the stress this way:

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think about is my to-do list. It's never ending and seems to get longer every month. When I think about it, I get anxious, because I know I won't have enough time to do what I need to do. Then the day goes by, and I do what I can, but most nights, when I'm trying to wind down and get to sleep, my last thought of the day is “I didn't get enough done.”

Leaders like Jasmine, caught on the hamster wheel of activity, are too busy to deal with the complexities of leading in today's workplace. What's more, they're too overloaded to recognize or admit that the way they're working isn't working.

Although information technology has advanced, our leadership practices have not. Most of today's leaders are painfully unaware of how all the changes in the workplace have made it so much more difficult to lead effectively. They don't realize that they're attempting to lead in the early 21st century using early 20th-century practices. The practices they're using were designed for a very different world. Continuing to use them perpetuates small-oven thinking.

So what's a 21st-century leader to do? What's the best way for leaders to change their approach to leading? The way to go forward is to look backward. After all, to get a handle on the future, you must understand the past.

Like the young woman and her family recipe, you can't take what's given to you for granted. Becoming aware of your inherited leadership legacy is crucial, because you won't be able to change what you don't notice.