Corporate Cruelty

Corporate Cruelty

The best engineer might make the worst manager. The best manager might make the worst engineer. The best sales person may be the last person on earth you’d hire for the sales managers job. The best doctor doesn’t run the hospital. Management is a job. A set of skills vastly different to any other. To be good at it is a gift, but not everyone is born to manage, all day every day.

Wrong people in wrong jobs causes domestic breakdowns, social violence, office politics and personal health breakdown. Business’s that demand high levels of management skill from their best technical or creative people are demanding blood out of a stone and should be held accountable for it.

The best sales person might ask to become a sales manager, because for them, this is their only path to leadership. They might look at the company hierarchy and see that the only way forward is either up or out. So, like most, they choose up. But management is different to sales and no matter how many training programs or MBA’s a person gets, there are certain people who are just not suited to the task.

Personnel consultants have no idea. Don’t rely on a staffing agency to be able to determine the sustainable managerial qualities of a person. They are as vulnerable to the smoke and mirrors game of endorsements, testimonials and references as you.

The key here is to understand the differences between your expectations of how a job will be done, the individuals expectations of how they would do the job, the needs of the job and the leadership required to support a team. Four factors and even then, the story is not finished. What if, the technical skill, the experience and the capacity of the individual you are considering for a job are perfect? Is that it?

If you trained an elephant to jump through a hoop, would you expect the elephant to do it all day, and last the distance. Cruelty to animals is prevented by law. Cruelty to humans is endorsed by business. Wrong people in wrong jobs, is as cruel to the individual as any other breach of human rights. We are just not sophisticated enough to see it yet.

Self management means knowing your constitution. Built for speed? Build to lead? Built to create? Built to Engineer. Built to manage. Management is, without doubt a career, and doing it well demands a series of capacities that are particular to a certain group of people.

To get around this we must divide management up into its component parts.

Leadership
Organization
Communication
Planning
Visioning
Motivating
Accounting
Coaching

All people can do all of these elements. All people cannot do all of these elements for long periods of time. So, some management jobs are 99% planning and 1% the rest. Or some management jobs are 99% leadership, communication and motivation and 1% the rest.

So, instead of dividing jobs into generic categories like “Sales Manager” you are far better off to divide jobs into percentages of the above categories. Then, you know the sustainable strength you need from a person.

A high coaching percentage will eliminate fire and air people. A high visioning percentage will eliminate earth people. The key here is to understand that everyone can do every task. The only real question is sustainability. For how long can a person do a certain element of the management role?

Cruelty to animals is banned. Cruelty to humans is not. Putting people in the wrong job, affects their health, family, relationship, happiness and ultimately their spiritual core. Both employee and employer need to be conscious of the pitfalls of “I can do anything: mindsets.

Live with Spirit

Chris

Too much work? Not enough Time?

Too much on? Overworked? There’s a better way
It’s 4.00am. I’m sitting with my morning coffee, writing my daily article. It rained last night, Sydney has been washed. The pain of last weeks disaster under the Harbour Bridge has given way to new news of disasters in the Solomon Islands. Sydney Harbour perfectly still. The water is like a mirror, boats, light reflections, its like a painting. The only sound are the sirens from ambulances, police cars chasing troubles. But even these sounds on a day like today are remote, almost invisible.

I muse in the mornings. Each day my prayers for the world float out into the ether. I never see them again. Words and thoughts just wafting out into a world so beautiful, so complex. I know every though finds a place, lands in a heart, sooths a wound, heals a sorrow. I am re assured, by my studies rather than faith, that my thoughts have merit, even if my ego can’t be gratified as a witness.

I feel so blessed to have a window through which I can see life with such an untainted perspective. I visit offices where everything is so real, serious, life threatening. If a lion were to be released in those places, it would make no difference, people are already so in panic. Their ego defends them, and attacks to sustain itself.

My greatest blessing comes through friendships. I have a friend who has stood by me in business through thick and thin helping me and sharing my vision of change at the heart of all this. I have a brother who has funded my dreams of homes for children abandoned in the streets of Kathmandu and left to starve amidst the tourists and Gore-Tex.

Today, I looked out the window while the world slept and watched the moon. It is the water of our lives. It causes tides, and menstrual cycles, and emotions and stock market crashes and fills our hospitals with mental breakdowns when it’s full. We, in our mind driven lives forget the moon. We listen to the guru talk about self mastery and think we are the master, and therefore accuse others of deliberate unconsciousness, but we are wrong in this. The moon pushes and pulls us, and we must not fight her. We must learn to play with her. This is the human heart.

Mind can control a car, but can never dream the true future. Mind can marry the right wife, but can never hold her for long. Mind can tell the world what is right, but can never cause it without war and punishment. Mind can find a cure, but can never heal.

Technology is caused by mind, but it’s function is not to cause itself. Technology is here to allow us to think with our heart. If we can subcontract worry to a machine, if we can automate the repetitive, if we can mechanize the distractions, we can live from our heart. We can care.

What hollow life we might build without technology. Our heart might stop without a new valve, we might spend all day adding numbers instead of milli seconds, we might lose another baby without the resuscitation now mobile in an ambulance. We are given freedom because technology can replace the animal nature, the manual task, the brain is no longer, king.

Are you taking advantage of this gift? Are you looking for ways to automate the repetitive, to mechanize the laborious, to refine the process, to reduce the cost? This is your chance to appreciate your opportunity. Working on the business not in it. To think – how can I do this better, in less time, with more sophistication, with more time spent on the heart of things and less in the mechanics. This is the future of leadership.

Hard work is bad management

Hard work is not the answer to demand. Sophistication in the process is. Consider how you can double your workload. Think then about what clumsy process is causing you to resist the idea. Do you still type on a keyboard? Are your presentations always one off, and therefore reinventing the wheel every time you build a car? Are people in your office doing what they are not good at?

Consider this. Culture in an office means – the unwritten rules. A sales office operates under certain rules because sales people face certain challenges with technology, emotion and motivation. A customer service office has the same issues but a totally different set of rules. If you put a cow in a cage with a tiger, what would happen? If you put designers in a room with marketers, what would happen? The resultant chaos might be a part of your idea of good healthy process. I’d be more inclined to consider a healthy process rather than cause human suffering for a mechanical result.

The world of FAST is FANTASTIC. Why? Because the faster you can do what the brain needs to do, the longer you can spend doing what a human is meant to do. Feel, intuit, love, and create. These things, machines can never do.

Do more in less time.

Make this your motto in the office. And instead of filling the “more time available” with low end fillers, take the time, to feel, intuit, love and create. This is the high end of the pecking order. This is the difference between sustainable success and short term victory overcoming dilemma.

Finally, look around you and beware of the person whose self worth is invested in helping you overcome dilemmas. Sometimes your “right hand man” (could be a woman of course) is actually drumming up problems to fix so that they stay “valuable”. A soft fleshy individual, or a fire eating male, might cause dilemma in an office or home in order to create a sense of purpose. Unable to concentrate, or enjoy their own company, they are like a fire fighter who, in the absence of a fire, has to cause one. Such is the realm of many failed or visionless entrepreneurs. They mistake fire fighting, with mountain climbing. Heartless consequences come from solving dilemma, (unless that’s your job). Instead, refresh, refine, re invent – change the process – automate and let people do, what people do best and get rid of the rest.

Have a heart. Live and work with Spirit

Chris Walker