I like the
Ozymandius poem. It’s a very clever way of saying that the
fruits of power are only enjoyed for your own lifetime. After you
are gone no one really cares about what you did or who you were and
all your works are as dust. The sneering face of the bully, the
message of their hubris, the absence of any visible sign of their
existence. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”
indeed!
“The
right tools at the right time” is a pretty obvious message to
anyone who has ever had to complete any kind of task. It gets a bit
more conceptual when you apply it to leadership and change
management. I find the idea of “power tools” appealing
for some reason. Fear, force, coercion and threat are easy to use
and usually effective at getting short term compliance or regaining
control of a group that has become undisciplined. These tools are
most effective when they are used by the group members on each other,
creating a unified team that is self governing. “Management
tools” I don’t have a lot of time for. While I
understand the use of metrics, models, training and procedural
activities, they bore me. “Leadership tools” are far
more interesting, vision, charisma, and inspiration. I find it hard
to resist leaders who display these things. “Culture tools”
are like a blend of power and management tools. The culture of an
organisation is really the sum total of the way they get things done.
The group dynamic and the level of bureaucracy are fairly good
indicators of how interesting the company is. The other metrics of
interest are the amount of group activities there are. I’ve
never been much of a work place socialiser, preferring to keep work
and play quite separate. The lesson from all this is the right tools,
right time message. I definitely prefer the crisis mode and I like
it when a leader steps up and gets things moving. Sitting around
being a business as usual operations kind of chap is about as
interesting as watching two ants crawl across a car park.
I find the
idea of emotional intelligence interesting and I understand that
there is plenty of evidence that leaders who have it are more
effective at motivating high performance teams. The problem with the
concept is that it requires a great deal of imagination to
understand, which automatically disqualifies most managers in my
opinion. Future focus is not a trait of too many managers that I
have ever worked with, they mostly seem interested in using
management tools and getting their metrics correct. I can’t be
bothered with all that metrics stuff which is why I have studiously
avoided management by working as the contract guru. If I could bust
a move straight from the coal face of the IT industry to the
strategic level of the boardroom I would, but the thought of chipping
away at it for the next 10 years doesn’t appeal. The lesson
here is that if you truly belong in the strategic space, then your
options are a bit limited. You can bust a move into government as a
policy analyst and make recommendations to ministers if you like
really big picture stuff. You could start your own company in which
case the strategy is all your from the get go. Or you move in
academia and hire yourself out as a strategy guru on the side. The
answer for me is to change industry, most likely law, or go into
academia.
The
lessons I take from the parable of Sadhu are twofold. Stress is a
great way to find emergent leaders. This is practiced by the
military and could well be applied to business. Personally I like
this idea but other people I have spoken to think it’s just a
way to encourage people out of a company. The second lesson is the
traits of good leaders: action orientated (tick), conflict resolvers
(cross), tolerant of ambiguity(cross), deal well with stress(cross),
like change(cross), strong sense of purpose(tick). Not the best
score card I have had to date. Going forward I think I will stick to
roles where I can be the guru and lead a bunch of high performance
people who are orientated towards producing quality results.
Reputation is something that matters more to me than control so it
will be in professional services and it will be in the quasi monopoly
industries like law, medicine or engineering.
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