The Wisdom of Failure by Laurence G. Weinzimmer & Jim McConoughey

Author:Laurence G. Weinzimmer & Jim McConoughey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

Trust Erodes

A leader who avoids conflict creates a cluster of passive-aggressive pathologies, with consequences that spread far beyond the employee they happen to be talking to at the moment. Just as the leader who craves harmony is unlikely to give a completely honest performance review, he is also unlikely to reveal a distressing business forecast to his staff. His desire to tell people what they want to hear is so ingrained, he will do so even if it means not telling the truth.

At a mid-sized California company that produced games for adults as well as for children, the financial outlook was bleak. Though the adult group and the children’s group historically maintained separate editorial, design, and production departments, the president felt it necessary to combine the production departments into one. Editorial and design naturally feared their departments would follow suit, but the president—who prided himself on being a good, likeable guy—assured them there was no intention of doing so, going so far as to explain that it wouldn’t make any sense for their business. Soon after that, members of the executive team leaked to staff the information that merging the departments was indeed being considered. Rumors circulated, and for months no one felt certain about where the company was headed. A year after the production departments merged, the head of human resources informed the adult art and editorial departments that they would indeed be combined with juvenile’s, but claimed that the idea had come up only three weeks before. That afternoon, when the president formally announced the change at the company meeting, he told everyone that merging the departments had been the plan from the get-go, assuming that this information would reassure them (and obviously forgetting that he’d said the opposite the previous year).

The good news was that, despite the blended departments, no jobs were lost. The bad news was that because of the way the situation was handled, many of the staff ceased to trust their leadership. How could they know whether they were being told the truth or just what their president thought they wanted to hear? Far from feeling assured when their president said, “Don’t worry—everyone still has a job,” they felt insecure. How could they be sure what was really going on behind closed doors, when no straight answer ever emerged?

The reason for the president’s attitude is easy to comprehend. He had built the company from the ground up, and it was like a child to him. He took its successes and failures very personally, and he cared immensely for the company’s employees. The company was his utopia, and if it had flaws, he didn’t want to acknowledge them. He also wanted his employees to be as invested in the company as he himself was, and he probably feared that being truthful with them about the decisions he was facing would give them pause. He may have justified his decision to lie by reasoning that he didn’t know for sure what he was going to do, and he didn’t want people to worry about something that might not come to pass.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.