Insecurity drains the life out of employees

Not long ago a majority of workers worked for the same company for 20, 30 or more years. It was a normal occurrence. At the time many of my friends were asking me how can I shift so much and so easily from one employer to another? That was easy enough, since nothing was “pushing me” out of a company except my curiosity and new, different challenges. Same as today? No, not the same here. Those were different times and different society back then.

In 2014 Hewlett-Packard only eliminated 34,000 jobs, while JP Morgan Chase has cut 20,000 from its workforce and JC Penney and Sprint announced cuts … In '70s and '80s, not so long ago, a modification of labor market began and we were able to observe anti-worker policies forming up. Nowadays a new business model (not so new any more) is disentangling the ties between employers and employees, fueling the perception that it is good to have employment flexibility.

In today’s business spheres where results of globalization, outsourcing, contracting, downsizing, recession and even natural disasters are all together killing ‘a job security’, how does one deal with such uncertainties?

It is well known that people can deal with short bursts of pressure pretty good, but that chronic uncertainty throws them in a vicious cycle of stress and fear. According to the research done by Stuart Whitaker at the University of Cumbria, having an insecure job has a more damaging impact on people's health than actually losing a job.

When we do not know whether we’ll have a job next year or, even worse, next week, how do we plan the life? Could we consider a loan to buy a house, start family or save for college or save for retirement? In the face of job insecurity, thoughts like these bring only panic and more pressure. Can we still spend with easiness if we are so insecure for the jobs we have?

When people fear that the world around them will fall apart, when our future becomes foggy, when feelings of powerlessness paralyze us, we tend to start to flip out. We pile on more work than we can handle, we are afraid to take sick leaves. Some people start to function on drugs, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol and other substances.  We drop everything that is good for us – we stop to care for our physical well-being, we stop practicing, we do not have fun with friends or have and enjoy vacations and so on.

Leadership Development

In my post Are Leaders Born or Made? I expressed my belief that the best leaders have some preconditions but they learn later on how to lead. By getting a leading position it should never be the end stage of learning and changing phase: to be (stay) in shape and understand the working environment constant learning and developing is what is needed and necessary.
When we already occupy a position of a leader what more should we learn, what competences should we develop and how do we do that?

Most leaders (I should rather use the term managers) begin and end their learning process by visiting MBA programs and maybe some additional courses. Unfortunately, traditional management practices (taught in a typical MBA program) are usually not very helpful in the field of innovation process (read more: Leading a team). Innovations foster any kind of development that is much needed in the very competitive business environment of nowadays therefore innovation is the key to success for any leader.

Any organization’s future success depends on identifying and evolution of the next generation’s leaders. Organizations that fail to do that sooner or later experience a loss of its high-potential talent that is usually at the time already in short supply. In a study by Laci Loew and Karen O’Leonard, Leadership Development Factbook 2012: Benchmarks and Trends in U.S. Leadership Development (July 2012) was acknowledged that US companies alone spend almost $14 billion on leadership development annually.

Why do then so many companies ignore proper leadership development? Is it because companies too often demand a wish list of ambiguous qualities like creativity and innovation that fail to align with organizational needs? Or is it due to assumption that ‘one size fits all’ and that the same group of skills or style of leadership is appropriate regardless of the strategy, organizational culture, or leader mandate?

Labeled leadership

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (Shakespeare).

Giving names or labels to differentiate leadership styles today is a huge business of how to invent and make up names and buzzwords from what should be part of normal human relationships between leaders and followers.

In my search for different leadership styles I was astounded by the fact that most of the times there is a unification of two important, but different, roles: management and leadership. In my blogs: Leader vs. manager, To manage people, To lead people I have already explained the issue and am not going to repeat it here again.

I am astonished that there are more than 20 different styles for just naming ‘different’ leadership approaches. Of some of them I have written in previous posts (Servant leadership, Authentic leadership, Charismatic Leadership, Transformational Leadership, Participative Leadership, Humble or Agile Leadership so here I’d like just to mention some more “styles” that are floating around: autocratic, coaching, laissez faire, quiet, situational, visionary, transactional.

Well, do we need so many of them?

Atypical views on Leadership - 1

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?

IQ & EQ for Leaders

Human beings are complex integrated systems. It is hard to define them by some theoretical calculations as hard as it is to quantify demanding processor’s unquantifiable actions. Nevertheless I teach my students two measures commonly used to explain humans and their roles in leadership.

IQ (intelligence quotient) is representing a person’s reasoning ability (measured using problem-solving tests) calculated by a mathematical formula that is supposed to be a measure of a person's intelligence. The quotient is traditionally derived by dividing an individual's mental age by his chronological age and then multiplied by 100 (thus IQ = MA/CA x 100) to get the statistical norm or average taken as 100. The most direct ancestor of today's intelligence tests was developed by Alfred Binet. He did it due to a request of an education commission in France in order to distinguish some intellectually impaired children from other intellectually normal ones. Later on Binet’s intelligence test was revised extensively to get the today's version of IQ by Lewis Terman.

EQ (emotional intelligence) is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work cooperatively with them. It is a combination of: Self-awareness - the ability to recognize an emotion as it happens; Self-regulation – having a control when one experiences emotions; Motivation - one achievement that requires clear goals and a positive attitude; Empathy - the ability to recognize how people feel which is important to success in your life and career; Social skills - the development of good interpersonal skills which is as well tantamount to success in your life and career.

Virtue - driven company

What YOU put up with is what YOU have to live with!

Modern corporate culture

Although companies today dispose of all kinds of employee assessment systems, the employees are still managed by managers rather than lead by leaders. Being treated as a cost, even expendable or hopeless, the staff, normally, acts in the same way.

Banks or financial service companies analyze the companies’ performance. For the writing of “the analyst reports” normally young people, freshly out of the school, are used. The report which mostly does not make any significant sense is then solely used by management as a base to steer the staff and processes the way they always wished but were ‘afraid’ to do. So we begin to work to live rather than live to work.

I might also say that in companies “a terrible job” is done when screening and matching people to tasks. Thousands of low level employees are hired but not empowered to actually change anything even in their own field of expertise for which they were hired. Their work is just to do the job (execute higher level decisions). Companies do not dispose of a long term plan to keep best people engaged; they don’t reward them for exceptional actions. No incentive is provided to those that are willing to be innovative. The incentive, if at all, is meant for those that do fewer errors and are willing to compel to the system. The employees are not empowered to solve problems. They are required to rather avoid them (by punished errors). Thusly, companies create a symptom of “someone else's problem”, certainly not my problem, not my responsibility.

In the companies that are not just managed but being lead by true leaders the employees come first and are encouraged to stand up and do it differently.

Resistance to change

To change . . . Why bother?

Heraclitus said: “Change is the only constant in life.” Accordingly, people like to change things or other people but are usually not so willing to change themselves.

Why do people resist to the change? Is it because they mistake inertia or no-change for safety and predictability? Logically, the fear of the unknown frightens us. Leaving a comfort zone and facing uncertainty creates a lot of anxiety thusly paralyzing any activity for a change even if the current situation or process is not functioning well. It is much more difficult to accept the change when we lack confidence. Mostly, we all tend to postpone the difficult or uncomfortable things that need to be changed. Postponing them until the very last minute (known as a “student syndrome”), until something generates an impulse of urgency. Why we believe that there is always enough time to think about a change tomorrow I have already described in Cause and consequence / Urgent and important.

Leadership By Virtue ~ book trailer

Blurb of the book:

Interwoven around the leadership process, corporate challenges and martial arts this book brings the reader along to "listen in" on the day to day developments, struggles and challenges.

The reader is shown from a first-person perspective the internal refinement of a leadership process based on non-Western approach. The main character, brought up in Europe and therefore used to Western "cultural background noise" although practicing Chinese martial arts, has to learn and understand the differences brought by Far East principles if he wants to grasp leadership from a different angle ...

The book has eighteen (18) chapters. Chapters one to five are dedicated to the background setting and the evolution of the story and characters; Chapters six to nine are devoted to open different approaches and mentality that is coming from Far East and Martial arts philosophy and in parallel gradually introducing difficulties in leadership process and (miss)understanding of those Far East concepts; final Chapter eighteen is dedicated to merge those Far East and Martial arts concepts and philosophies with "known" Western ones and thus opening a new entanglement approach proposed with the use of the Leadership by Virtue.

A video review:

Jaro Berce has poured in the “Leadership by Virtue” his passion, knowledge, and wisdom. It is an exceptional view of blending eastern and western thinking and practices; it is thought provoking, an eye opener, challenging and more.

The book “Leadership by Virtue” by Jaro Berce is not just a novel, but a tremendous learning experience (by Pamela Jill Rapley). 

Related articles

• IBP's Trailer: Leadership By Virtue by Author Jaro Berce
• Leadership by Virtue background
• How To Mute The Western "Cultural Background Noise" With Far East Mentality?
• Leadership by Virtue by Jaro Berce - A review
• Lessons on Leadership from the Nonprofit Sector
• IBP's Trailer: Leadership By Virtue by Author Jaro Berce

Education, tools and leadership

There are numerous programs, schools and methodologies helping to understand and learn how to manage business and people:  different master of business administration (MBA) schools with their own programs and almost abundant methodologies and tools they teach their students.  Unfortunately no one ever learns whatsoever about e.g.: ecology at an MBA or in their programs. Unethical business and environmental practices of some MBA students are uncovered consistently.

Responsibility across the broadest spectrum of society is vitally important to the future of the global economy. Having said that the key question in today's business environment still remains: do all those programs, methodologies and tools really come out the way we need them to?

The biggest issue to introduce all of the different programs every couple of years or so is mostly based on the matter that companies are entirely dismissing experience if you do not have a degree. This is short sighted and even negligent but attractive  to those that want higher salary, better career opportunities or better consolidated business network. The second matter is that different methodologies and tools get sold to C-level as a silver bullet that is going to fix all of their issues, problems and will bring out the solutions.

But to probe even deeper - it is not the methodologies or the tools that bring solutions or break problems. They are good and they work when they are just frameworks to organize efforts. The important and mostly overlooked aspect of application of methodologies and tools is: they need to be based on the business needs, culture of organization and should be properly trimmed to benefit from using them.

Leadership and responsibility

Responsibility translates into commitment to finish something. People mostly like and tend to hide from responsibility for their deeds, actions, and decisions.

When learning to master martial arts one is encouraged to think about the responsibility and how to use it in all techniques. Depending on energy, force, and power used a martial artist may kill, immobilize or cure a person - the body point to which it is applied is the same. It is a heavy and sole responsibility what and how to use the accumulated martial arts knowledge.

The responsibility is, by all means, one of the most demanding requirements in leadership. “Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It's inevitable, if you're honourable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity” are the words of General Colin Powell on leadership’s responsibility.

Middle manager and leadership

There are many different roles in a work environment, but those that stand out and are most visible are the roles of leaders and managers that represent the company, specially the top ones. Readily available are numerous articles describing their role and their way of leading /managing people. Mostly described as a workforce are those on the hierarchy bottom: they work as they are told to. Here, I’d like to challenge your opinion whether they represent ‘the cost’ or ‘the asset’ of an organization. In between there is a number of intermediate managers being subordinate to the senior management but above the lowest levels of operational staff.

Duties of a middle management typically include carrying out the directives of senior management at the operational level, supervising subordinate managers and employees to ensure functioning of the organization. Middle managers are rarely a prime focus during the changes in the organizations because they are badly needed in order to execute whatever upper management comes up with. Since companies have slimmed down and cut out many organization levels they lack of the career advancement opportunities. In reality they are mostly the physical embodiment of the culture or rather bureaucracy level of an organization.

Walk meetings

A while ago I happened to have a meeting while pleasantly walking through the park. Since then I try, whenever possible, to avoid to meet in the office, for coffee or tea in a pub and choose a walk in the nature.

 At the beginning I wondered what the reaction of the people will be. Would they feel comfortable enough and relaxed? My intentions were to improve the energy and mindset of the conversation by changing the environment. The studies show that the physical aspect of walking is beneficial to positive brain functioning. And recent brain and learning theories confirm that activities help in learning. This is also how Aristotle taught his apprentices.
You may say that for a time now GOLF has been doing the same. I know that corporate as well as military forces do different types of meetings all the time: at games, bars, gyms, parties. But my kind of a meeting is costless and beneficial at the same time. We all agree that a meeting should be done with an objective: to discuss business, to develop an idea, to connect with person. As an environment inspires connection among participants, the Nature is a perfect choice. It seems like a perfect setting for a possible win-win situation. And on top of it, there is a kind of a disarming element in Mother Nature that works for all of us.

Leadership by Virtue background

A common conclusion of all studies on our cultures is that we are definitely different. This is not really a great contribution but rather just a common knowledge. And this conclusion is what mostly challenged me. To successfully lead people you need to find what binds the people together and not what separates them.

Within globalization processes people that are now to work together do not come only from the same cultural background but were raised also in different cultures. And leaders are to take into consideration this new dimension, while, due to current perpetuating crisis, at the same time dealing with finding a way, a fresh and new leadership approach. And the stress should be put on the change of leadership practices and not only on a repainting of current ones. To introduce a new approach to leadership, the book “Leadership by Virtue” takes a different venue - a way that brings Far-East concepts into Western approaches and entangles both.

 The “Leadership by Virtue” approach is not about the instruction on how and what to do. It is rather a complex interlinked method to change oneself first. Accordingly, it is not ‘externally oriented’, as the case is in most of the Western culture’s way of management or leadership methodologies. Here the book takes  more Far-East tactic and is dedicated to ‘internal self’.

Leadership dilemma

What made Apple so successful and a very good place to work? ”The lack” of bureaucracy within projects, engineer-focused corporate culture, emphasis on passionate and loyal employees, the huge company has maintained the corporate culture from the start-up days, said Bianca Males in ‘8 Management Lessons I Learned Working at Apple.’ Is that all?

John Harvey-Jones claims: “If a company is successful, it is due to the effort of everyone, but if it fails, it is because of the failure of the board. If the board fails, it is the responsibility of the chairman, notwithstanding the collective responsibility of everyone.” This is a better, but still not an all-encompassing answer.

Least of effort in leadership

The Mandarin Chinese word wú wéi could be described: ‘by inaction nothing is left undone.’ It may well be also translated as ‘non-acting makes all action possible.’ Lǎo Zǐ, a philosopher of ancient China and the author of the Dào Dé Jīng, in stanza 38 ‘About Dé of the Dào’ described it as:
High virtue by obliging not acquires moral force.

Low virtue obliges always and thus lacks moral force.

High virtue neither strives nor acts for its own ends.

Low virtue does not strive but acts for its own ends.

Dào is usually translated as way, road, channel, path, doctrine, or line and by Chinese opinion cannot be obtained as virtue cannot be approached. The legendary Chinese sovereign and cultural hero Yellow Emperor (reigned from 2.696–2.598 BE) said that once Dào is lost, virtue arises; once virtue is lost, humaneness arises; once humaneness is lost, righteousness arises; once righteousness is lost, formalism arises. But formalism is the flowery representation of Dào and the beginning of disorder.

Management practices and tools that just “don’t work”

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:

(1) In Japan at Toyota Motor Company, Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo incorporated Ford’s type of production and some other techniques into an approach named the Toyota Production System or Just In Time Production (JIT). The inventory strategy strives to improve a business return on investment by simultaneously reducing in-process inventory and associated costs.
(2) The core idea of a Lean organization is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with less resource.

(3) Iwao Kobayashi’s 20 keys is a longer list that can be used in manufacturing audits. It reads very much like a “who’s who” of manufacturing innovations and hence makes a very useful checklist.

(4) Six Sigma (6б) is a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola in 1981. It was initially aimed at quantifying the defects that occurred during manufacturing process first and then at reducing those defects to a very small level.

(5) Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a top-down approach in which organizations become more efficient and modernized. Reengineering is a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, speed and service.

(6) The Self Directed Work Team (SDWT) is perhaps the most powerful organizational concept that motivates, coordinates, solves problems and also makes better decision than an individual could. But this performance comes at a price: decisions are slow, work teams require extensive training and months to mature.

(7) Total Quality Management (TQM) is a set of management practices throughout the organization geared to continuously improve the business processes in order to ensure that the organization consistently meets or exceeds in satisfying a customer or a supplier.

(8) … others.

Mission and vision

Is the mission in a company a driving force for actions? Does a mission provide overall goal, a path, and is it a guide for decision-making?

And a vision? Is it an aspiration for a company? Does it focus on the potential essentials in the company's mid-term or long-term future, or what company intends to be?

Most of mission and vision statements are generic, therefore awfully deficient. A result of long-drawn meetings where in the end everyone is so tired and approves any nonsense just to bring it to the conclusion. They are full of phrases like ‘market-leader’, ‘best-in-region’,  ‘most successful’, ‘best customer/owner value’, ‘leading in this and that'. Fluffy words that mean nothing. They just repulse a reader and make skip the text!

Organizational change

Organizational change is, or should be, just one of the processes within the strategy’s frame and company vision. Why then companies have to “struggle” when introducing changes? Why do they need to change? Ever changing environment, markets, products are just pushing the limits of a current stability of the companies and provoke never ending chain of changes.

In his blog Bernard Marr says “a good mission statement articulates the purpose of the company, basically why it exists, what it does and for whom. It should serve as an ongoing guide that spells out what the company is all about. The mission should focus on the here and now.” And where do we see a necessity for a change that a company should follow? In “a vision statement where the goals and aspirations for the future are outlined. It creates a mental picture of a specific medium-term target and should serve as a source of inspiration.”

But are these definitions enough to smoothly drive a change? Company’s organizational culture, as described in the previous blog: “Organizational culture and martial arts,” is the sum of values and rituals defined by rules. It is also a part of a “bigger picture” that surrounds an organization and each of us, as I explained in my TedxTalk. And these substances present difficulties or even block a change. Employees of a company, as others, are perceiving stability as security therefore opposing changes. Consequently, a permanent conflict prevents a peaceful process of change.

Corporate governance in multicultural organization

Corporate governance refers to the issues associated with the way corporations are structured, managed and operated. The use of the term “corporate governance”, the evolution of the concept and what it entails has started in the early 1980’s.

 Among the first was the Cadbury Committee. They defined the purpose of corporate governance in 1992 namely, as a set of processes, customs and policies that frame the business of the company and help manage the subsidiaries. This is then operationalized in a uniform method through administered or controlled directives.

The most quoted and referred to document in this field is the OECD principles corporate governance. OECD defines it as a set of relationships between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders, and other stakeholders. Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set. The means of attaining those objectives and performance monitoring are determined. So, the main recommended principles are stated as rights and equitable treatment of shareholders, interests of other stakeholders, role and responsibilities of the board, integrity and ethical behavior, disclosure and transparency.

Internet games and Leadership

Most people argue that games are just for fun and to kill time. How would you consider gaming experience in person’s curriculum vitae asking for a leadership position vacancy? An asset?

Nick Yee surveyed MMORPG players for the first time at the end of the previous millennium. Since then, he has surveyed over 35.000 MMORPG players of the most popular USA MMORPG games. Near 280 respondents wrote about their guild leadership experience. Yee’s findings about leadership can be described in the same terms as in the real world.

First, most novice guild leaders fall into the trap of trying to be everyone’s friend and making sure that everyone in the guild is happy. The most common lesson learned was that it’s simply impossible to please everyone. Second, in any situation where people have different needs and motivations, conflicts will arise. These conflicts tend to be particularly stressful because of the existing friendships and ties within the guild. Inevitably, the guild leader will be asked to become the mediator. Third, many respondents noted that laying down a firm hand was important and that sometimes you have to be tough and say no. Because many guilds start off as small, casual, and friendly guilds, guild leaders often feel conflicted when it comes to disciplining guild members. The next finding was the difficulty in picking the right people for the guild, as well as the difficulty in kicking people out of the guild. In the game and in the real life, the duality of being a leader is well perceived. It is not easy to be a friend and a leader at the same time. The guild leaders highlighted the importance of having ground rules, making people aware of them and being consistent with those rules, which is equal to real-life leadership.