An outstanding Leadership for cross cultural team(s)
Have you met a person that was thinking in
a completely different way to yours? What kind of impression does it leave on
you? Do you dismiss it immediately, or you find it worthy, erroneous …?
For me it is exciting, definitely because
my life path is somehow atypical, too. In our core we people are similar no
matter where we come from. Not long ago I had a TEDx talk about the human behavior that surpasses “the cultural background noise” – “the
noise” that accompanies us throughout our life and normally influences our
values, ethics and morals, mentally and subconsciously. Unfortunately, this
kind of reasoning I find that is still missing in common stances and leadership
practices. Let me try to show some examples which are going to be based on atypical
views.
From the management’s perspective, managers
perform tasks, manage people and do business. Accordingly, there are numerous
methodologies and tools helping to manage business and people: Just In Time
Production, Kobayashi’s 20 keys, Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering … to
name some. In business environment, do all these methodologies and tools really
come out the way we need them to? Current economic and financial situation
makes us doubt it. If these tools were as efficient and as great as claimed,
then we should not see companies struggling and vanishing. Why it is then so?
Management may conclusively respond that an
organization strives to achieve only one ultimate goal: to become a competitive
profit oriented “machine”. To do that the key device of modern management is in
lowering costs: pushing on suppliers’ side, on employees, on product
development and production, to name just some. And the outcome that we see all
over the world is ever faster cycles of crisis.
A lot of researches show that ignoring
other peoples’ work is as bad as shredding it, but we still do it. People like
“to fight” and have challenges. It motivates them. The motivation can take on
most, if not all, obstacles. But, in MBA
schools managers go through courses and books teaching them how to control
people mostly by using a zero-sum game, i.e. — someone wins and someone loses. A
good example of it is the case of ‘the best of the month’, where only one employee
can achieve it, all the others are losers. And this is quite a popular
practice. Dan Gilbert said in his TED talk: “In pre-industrial area Adam Smith
was right about efficiency, but not now, in Knowledge-economy, where Karl Marx
is right about motivating by meaning!”
Will continue ….
Re-published from “the extraMILE” (autumn
2013; Issue 5; September 2013)
An outstanding Leadership for cross cultural team(s) -- */S.Y\ A Permanent Creativity as THE SPIRAL - LIKE STRATA OF HUMAN VALUE SYSTEM CULTURAL CODES for Right Understanding / Spiral Leader for Innovations /.
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