Addiction or habit
Many of the successful people I meet put a lot of time
and energy into their business, but they often pay a price with dysfunctional
families and abandoned hobbies.
The female MD referred to her partner as the 'home
husband' and then she laughed as she explained that he does have a job but it's
only "nine to five". Heading up a fashion enterprise that employs
forty people, Jenny does not shirk the long hours and is home most weekends
with the children. But her partner says she may be there physically but she is
"miles away" emotionally. And on Sunday she "catches up" on
the laptop.
We talked about this pattern of behaviour and how it had
come to be the norm. And we wondered aloud whether this was merely a bad habit,
that both parties actually want to change, or whether it was some form of
addiction.
We agreed, rightly or wrongly, that a habit is something
you can change and an addiction is something that maybe you can't.
Jenny thought for a minute and then said that she is
prepared to put in the hard miles for another five years and then she would
sell up and collect her bag of gold.
That is an addiction.
Eyes and ears
Some
business leaders think you can do everything in business with the right
software; yet others think you can’t do anything worthwhile with any sort of
technology.
I watched
the MD of a plc tapping away on his computer whilst we were waiting for a
meeting to start. “What do you think of this?” he called. I walked round the
desk to see him trying to complete a questionnaire about his fellow directors.
There were ten
questions on eight different management competences and he had eight directors.
That’s 640 clicks. He was being asked to score these people on a scale of 4 for
excellent down to 0 for abysmal.
His mind was
wandering; he hardly knew Joe Hayes, a recent addition to the Board, so he went
down the middle with a succession of two’s punctuated with the occasional one
and three “just to balance it up.”
“So what do
you think?” he asked.
I advised
that he had never wasted his time more completely. Further, if he is looking
for genuine performance improvement from self and colleagues then the only way
to appraise anyone is face to face, eyeball to eyeball.
The bully
It's not hard to spot the bully at the top of organizations. Unbeknown to most of them, they give away their preferred way of dealing with people in a variety of well rehearsed ways.
Some are renowned for the speed of change in their moods. One minute they can be affable, amusing and generous. Within a split second that same person can be critical, abusive and cruel. No one knows what presses the button.
Others see themselves and their business from first position; that is to say through their own five senses. It is only when you try to discuss, say team working (second position) or maybe competitors (third position) that you notice their words, their tone of voice and their body language are actually saying something different. This known as congruence, or lack of it in this example.
This is not to say that an element of bullying is not a useful and sometimes necessary element in the make - up of some very successful leaders. It is more that their approach can simply demean, devalue and even destroy some people’s lives.
