It’s a sad commentary on the business world, but thousands of times a day, day after day, bosses in every industry, in companies large and small, issue “or else” ultimatums to their subordinates—whether intentionally or not—and ultimatums are threats. The threats are rarely direct (Do it or start looking.), more often, they are subtle (I expect employees who work here to be team players.), but the threat is there: Do X if you want to keep your job.

Obviously, this is atrocious management, since

• threats are tremendously debilitating to those receiving them, often costing them the confidence to do their job; but
• it is the manger who threatens who loses the most—the credibility to run the organization.

Beyond the direct effect of the threats, there is a ripple effect that is far worse—the seeding of a self-propagating culture of intimidation, i.e., I’ll do it to you because the person above does it to me [and I want to get even].

It kills creativity, innovation, motivation, engagement, caring, ownership, in fact, everything that it takes to compete in today’s economy.

The good news is that, as with most management practices, the choice of using or not using ultimatums, no matter the form, is yours, and yours alone.

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Last year I wrote about the pros and cons of AMS (assumption, manipulation and self-fulfilling prophesy). As I said then, although there are positive aspects AMS usually surfaces in a negative way.A client who agrees with how important it is to avoid AMS asked me to come up with a simple, memorable way to present why assuming isn’t a good thing to do. He wanted something that would really sink in, not in a preachy way, but a fun way to which all his people could relate in all parts of their lives.

So I was staring at the word on the screen and that’s when I realized that we could use an oldie to put the idea across in just 13 words.

Now, scattered around the offices are signs that read

Think before you assume—don’t make an ass out of u and me!

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It’s a sad Saturday night as I write this. I don’t watch the news so I wasn’t aware that Paul Newman died Friday.I grew up watching his movies and reading about his life beyond them. Newman was a great actor and director, but he was a brilliant human being—a much more important role, although you wouldn’t know it in today’s celebrity-hyped world.

His amazing 50 year marriage to Joanne Woodward is proof that marriage is dependent on the people involved, not outside circumstances.

But it was his political stands and philanthropic efforts that always resonated most with me.

Newman’s Own donates all profits and has given away more than $200 million. He founded Newman’s Hole in the Wall camps with 11 around the world—135,000 gravely ill children have attended them free of charge.

And now, a few words from Paul…

“Why would I go out for a hamburger when [I] have steak at home?” (In reference to why he never strayed.)

“Who’s to say who’s an expert?” (Certainly somehting to keep in mind the next time you get ‘expert’ advice.)

“The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films.” (Happily so. He couldn’t donate the film profits.)

“I picture my epitaph: “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown”. (Failure never even came close.)

“If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.” (Newman proved this one totally wrong.)

“You can’t be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: ‘Holy Christ, whaddya know – I’m still around!’ It’s absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.” (But not for nearly long enough.)

Goodbye, Paul, you will be sorely missed!

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Have you stopped to think that the “leaders” responsible for this mess are mostly Boomers and a few older Gen X?

It doesn’t surprise me, the Boomers’ parents tried to give them everything that they didn’t have and ended up with the first sex/drugs/rock&roll generation that thumbed their collective nose at “the rules” more than any previous one.

They, in turn, raised the first “entitled” generation and Gen X has increased that attitude by an order of magnitude.

In 1977 Richard Nixon said, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” and it seems as if the generations that revile him have taken that as their individual mantra—in spirit if not in fact.

The effort eliminate accountability and further increasing that sense of entitlement to further trash future leaders’ ethical base is in full swing. (Texas seems to be taking a leading role in both. Read this, this and this.)

Religion doesn’t seem to be the answer—I’m sure that most “leaders” of the current debacle would tell you that they have a strong faith, as would all the religious “leaders” who have lied, cheated, stolen and abused.

Education certainly doesn’t lead to a higher moral plane—the millions of people damaged by the well-educated people who wreaked havoc on the global economy certainly equals, if not exceeds, the damage done by drug dealers and other criminals.

Obviously, ignorance doesn’t cut it, either.

I don’t know the answer, but I’m pretty sure it starts in the crib and the initial responsibility belongs to the people responsible for creating that life.

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I’ve never been a big believer in the cult of individual leadership, a subject brilliantly discussed at Managing Leadership.The current economic meltdown is brought to you by the same folks who have been lauded for years for their extraordinary leadership.

Nor do I believe that leadership is positional; true leadership is found at all levels—it comes forward and makes itself felt when need arises.

Of course, that rarely happens, since most organizations subscribe to the tenets of individual and positional leadership.

CEOs are praised for their brilliant leadership during good times and condemned for not producing the same results in economic downturns.

Worse, their results are compared to predecessor’s performance during heady economic expansion—an environment in which it takes far less skill to produce profits.

It’s said that leadership requires vision and all these leaders had visions—unfortunately. They had visions of being the biggest, baddest, richest corporation in their field—and they were lauded for that vision.

It will be interesting to watch leadership gurus roll out the disclaimers and disavow the same folks who they’ve held up as examples of how to lead.

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By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

Wes Ball, Tuesday’s regular guest, posted his response to my posting about the Dallas Independent School District grading policy.

He makes a point that a nurturing approach is a good one.  And I agree with him that giving students the opportunity to fix mistakes within defined boundaries is a good learning strategy, and one that I routinely use for my college students.

However, the key point is in the definition of those boundaries.

DISD has virtually removed boundaries. That is not acceptable.  If you go to a doctor for a serious illness, would you trust your doctor’s treatment if you knew that he or she virtually never got it right the first time?  Just what are the defined limits of acceptable shortfalls?  Sometimes, you just have to get it right.

Just look around and you will see the consequences of teaching people that they don’t have to be held responsible. If you teach students that sort of thing, then they will go into the workforce with that attitude.  And then you will have such things as lenders not thinking through who they lend money to, borrowers not thinking if they can repay loans, and top executives for major corporations not looking towards the future of their companies.  After all, if everything goes bust somebody will come along and bail them out and make everything OK, right?

But I think that the attitude that it is OK to set up policies that do not hold students responsible for their own misdoings is simply a carryover from the DISD’s top leaders’ own philosophies.

Now, it turns out that they don’t want to be held responsible for their own screw ups.  Apparently, DISD hired some new teachers last year, but forgot to think about how to pay for them.  This led to a $64,000,000 budget shortfall in 2007. That is expected to soar to nearly $84,000,000 this year.

How can top executives in charge of such a large district foul up enough to miss out on the fact that they were spending 64 million dollars more than they were taking in through taxes? This is not a small sum of money.  This is not simply a minor accounting error.  This is not just someone putting some expenditure in the wrong column of a data table or listing it under one account instead of another.  This is a major blunder.

But are the top school district executives held to account? Uh, no. The ones being held to account for this are the teachers who are facing losing their jobs.  Up to 700 teachers may be laid off in the middle of the school year.

What effect will that have on students who started learning from one teacher only to be shoved into another, over crowded, classroom with a different teacher?

And what of the teachers, themselves?  If they lose their jobs, they lose their way to make a living.  Teaching jobs don’t pay a lot to start with.  And teaching jobs are keyed to the academic year.  Teaching jobs begin at the start of the school year.  It is almost unheard of for a teacher to be hired in the middle of the year.  So, these teachers are out of a job until next August at the earliest.  Is that fair to them?

No, I think that accountability is important.  I think that standards need to be held fast.  I think that the bar needs to be set, and students, administrators, employees, and everyone needs to make it.  A good leader needs to encourage his followers to meet the challenge and to make the grade.

And if they don’t, then there must be consequences.  If the leader screws up, then he needs to face the consequences, too.

I’m including links to various news stories for more in depth information.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091708dnmetdisdcuts.1bd57b1.html

http://cbs11tv.com/business/education/disd.teacher.layoffs.2.819119.html

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-disdbudget_23met.ART.State.Edition2.26b709a.html

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Be sure and check out my other WW: different still fits

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By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.Building future leaders takes creative nurturing, because leaders are both born AND made.  It’s up to us to do the “making” part.

There is a lot of failure on the track to leadership competence.  It’s doubtful any of the leaders I know could have gotten there, if they had not been nurtured through failure.  Even so-called “natural” leaders that have the combination of dominant and influencing personality styles need nurturing to make them successful.

A couple of weeks ago, CandidProf (guest blogger every Thursday) made note of the 2008-2009 standards for grading policy of the Dallas School District.  He expressed some concern about the fact that, in an effort to reduce the high school dropout rate, this school district mandated that teachers give students multiple chances to pass tests, not give any student a “zero” score for any test or assignment (no matter what they did or did not do), and accept overdue assignments with no or minimal penalty.

While the policy seems like an easy one to condemn and seems to embody all the laziness and attitudes of entitlement we see in young persons applying for jobs these days, there are some interesting aspects of this that have application in business leadership development.  Many persons have complained that this kind of approach to education in no way mirrors what those students might encounter in the working world.  The reality, however, is that good management that has as its objective to develop strong leaders does use similar techniques.

The problem may be not so much in the policy itself, but rather in the lack of accountability that this approach seems to provide.  I would go further and say that the real problem is that students are not given any vision for why they need to learn what is being taught.  Every person needs to understand why they must do something painful — and learning can be very painful for children without a proper vision for the future.  Employees also need that kind of vision-casting.   Without a clear vision for why they are required to work harder and learn more, most people will resist.

Every leader I know has been nurtured by a mentor.  Every one has been given the opportunity to fail along with support to understand how to succeed. Everyone has been given the opportunity to make mistakes within defined boundaries, because learning happens best in such an environment.

Within my own company, I made a point of creating mentoring relationships with and among employees.  I continually created opportunities for employees to learn through failure while providing a “safety net” that meant they knew they would not be fired for failure, except in certain areas of behavior or where there was a clear indication that they were not capable of doing the job needed.  They certainly were not put in a position where a failure could irreversibly harm the company, because that would have been bad leadership.  But they were given the chance to experiment with making decisions and even making recommendations to our customers where appropriate to the level that they had proven themselves capable.

I was extremely successful in taking persons with little or no experience and making them not only highly-skilled in the difficult and somewhat obtuse business of strategic innovation consulting, but also capable of leadership of others.  In fact, I discovered that it was far better for me to develop an inexperienced but motivated and qualified person into a leadership role over time than it ever was to hire a person already experienced through another company.  It was far too painful trying to overcome the bad learning that the experienced person had gained somewhere else.

The secret to nurturing and developing these future leaders was simple in concept:

• Give them a vision of what the future could look like for them.
• Give them an “identity” as being part of a great organization that is doing something of real value.
• Give them the basic skills and relational training they needed.
• Provide them with “safe” ways to fail, followed by nurturing learning as to how to succeed next time.
• Encourage them in failure and success.
• Let them grow as quickly as they can take it, always supported by continuing encouragement, nurturing, and training.
• Give them public praise when they have proven themselves of real leadership value.

The results were a highly motivated team that was (by measurements common to our industry) about twice as efficient as the average per salary dollar invested.  They also were a cohesive team that liked each other and liked working there.  And we were able to gain the kinds of clients that even much larger competitors only dreamed of getting.  The biggest problems we had were from experienced persons who thought they should be given the chance to “lead” before they even understood what our company was all about.

So, if you want to develop strong future leaders (or just good employees), I would say the Dallas schools idea is not a bad one; it just requires strong vision-casting, nurturing, and encouragement to make it work.  

What do you think?

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I’ve written a number of posts abut the lack of leadership in healthcare and the resulting problems with links to useful articles. I’ve even managed to discuss them relatively calmly and sans four-letter words—or at least edited them out. (My focus isn’t surprising, since I’m one of the 47 million uninsured.)Three new articles prompt today’s post.

The first was an article, including multiple links to additional information, at Health Care Renewal by Roy M Poses MD. It shines a light on just how little unethical and/or illegal actions impact a career these days.

On September 10th, according to Bloomberg, “UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s former chief executive officer William McGuire agreed to pay $30 million to settle a lawsuit brought against the company and individual defendants over backdated stock options.” But don’t waste your sympathy on Mcguire, who still has around $800 million in stock options to fall back on.

On September 11th, “the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported Stephen Parente, director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute in the Carlson School of Management said the school had given him the go-ahead to explore the idea [to be "executive in residence"] with McGuire, former chief executive of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group… “We don’t really care about the stock options.”"

How’s that for a great leadership stance?

On September 18th, The Star-Tribune reported that the University of Minnesota is disavowing any plans to make McGuire a faculty member.

Looks like someone with at least a half a brain figured out that having an ethically challenged “executive in residence” wasn’t a good idea.

The second highlights yet another onerous practice of healthcare providers called “balanced billing”—only this one’s often illegal.

“Balance billing most frequently occurs when medical providers participating in a managed-care network believe the plan’s insurer is imposing too deep a discount on medical bills or is taking too long to pay. California, New Jersey, and 45 other states ban in-network providers from billing insured patients beyond co-payments or co-insurance required by the plan. Similarly, federal law prohibits providers from billing Medicare patients for unpaid balances… Many states also shield insured patients from balance billing by out-of-network hospitals and doctors in emergencies, since patients usually don’t control who treats them in those situations.”

Illegal or not, when collectors threaten to trash your credit people pay up. Better to call your State’s Attorney General and scream bloody murder. And if you’re unfortunate enough to live in one of the five states where it’s not illegal maybe you’d better get your network together and lobby for a change.

The third brings us to a new take on managed care.

“Consider what is happening in New England. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, that state’s dominant insurer, and financially struggling Caritas Christi Health Care, its second-largest hospital network, want to switch from a system that charges patients for every medical service to a managed-care-like flat fee per patient. The yearly fee would be adjusted for age and illness…

According to Dr. Stuart Rosenberg, head of a group of 1,400 doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess MedicalCenter in Boston, “70% of U.S. doctors who are specialists would be loath to enroll in a system that emphasizes primary care.

At least a third of those trillions is wasted on unnecessary care, according to the nonprofit Dartmouth Institute and other researchers, and medical experts blame widespread fee-for-service plans. These encourage volume over quality—doctors and hospitals have a financial incentive to perform more and more tests and operations whether they’re needed or not.”

Will it be better? Who knows, but at least they’re trying.

Consistent through all the problems, as well as the barrier to potential solutions, is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) of greed and mememe that permeates our society.

In fact, that MAP is the one constant thread I see tying together the debacles on Wall Street, in healthcare, education, religion and a host of other problems.

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I love the comics. I’ve followed a lot of good ones over the years, but my hands down all-time favorite is Calvin and Hobbs written by Bill Watterson.Watterson is an interesting guy. He never allowed any commercial products to be made from his strip—no stuffed Hobbs (or I’d have one!), no Calvin dolls, nothing. And he allowed the compilations of his strips only grudgingly. (I own most of them.)

When he decided to stop that was it.

Obviously, he wasn’t driven by money; he didn’t want celebrity. He said what he wanted to say—no more and no less. But what he said will resonate for many years to come.

About education: “Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?” (Today’s students have this one down pat.)

About writing: “The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!” (But with a little more effort it can be just the opposite.)

About business: “To make a business decision, you don’t need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.” (An awful lot of CEOs seem to have taken this attitude to heart.)

About living: “There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.” (True, but I’m trying—are you?)

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