bad management advice

Neal Whitten gave a keynote at PMI's inaugural NorCal Symposium in Sacramento, proposing his thoughts on leadership, many of which left me aghast. For example, he contests that the "benevolent dictator" model is the only true model for leadership, as consensus-based solutions lead to a watered-down solution at best. While I can see his point of view in reference to accountability -- one person is responsible, rather than a team -- it's clear that it's been years since he's been in a workplace.

In Managing the Non-Profit Organization, Peter Drucker notes that dissent within an organization about a decision rarely come from that decision itself, but from implications and assumptions behind that decision. If a leader adopts the "benevolent dictator" style that Whitten proposes, those root concerns will not come out, and a decision will be much less informed. I love what Drucker says about making difficult decisions:

All the first-rate decision makers I've observed, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a very simple rule: If you have consensus on an important matter, don't make the decision. Adjourn, so that everybody has a little time to think. Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.

Whitten's whole argument about team accountability is a red herring. The accountability issue is resolved if a decision is made, and I make the commitment to carry it out.

Plus, the most critical element of an effective team is not the fact that this one decision was made swiftly or well -- we need to ensure that everyone has been heard in order to build a strong team, so that in the future, members don't keep crucial information to themselves, because "no one listens anyway." Why would we not want to engage all participants and obtain buy in to a decision in process, rather than boldly make a decision, try to sell it to the team and the organization, and then be surprised by issues I had not taken the time to explore and understand?
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But more dangerous than promoting leadership by dictatorship was Whitten's statement that as an employee, I should not look out for the company. I should only look at my own domain of responsibility, and treat that domain as if it was my own company. If we do that, the company will improve. I call bullshit.

In 1998, I worked for RCA, which was the largest television manufacturer in the United States. We had the number one market share in almost all of our product categories, a fantastic distribution channel and great retailers who supported our brand. Then, one day, something happened.

The internet.

Omigosh, we have to sell online before Sony does! What do we do? Let's throw together a $6 million budget, throw fifty guys into cubes in a hallway, and get an online store done from the ground up in less than six months! We'll have to figure out tax issues, because we've never sold directly to consumers before, and we don't actually know how to sell to consumers, but never mind that, and logistics, because we've never shipped less than a truckload at a time, and wow, won't customers call us about their orders, so we'll have to outsource that, and legal issues, and....

And you know what? We got it all done. It was amazing. What a fantastic project. We did the impossible. Great job, team.

Except, hmm... now Best Buy and Circuit City are mad at us, and say they are going to drop our product line. We can't sell competitively, or we will anger even more of our retailers. So we'll have to mark our prices way up, and we have to charge tax and shipping, and shipping on a 52" television is quite a lot, so maybe we throw in shipping for free, and where did our profitability go? And how come we can't sell anything?

We did a fantastic job, did everything right, but we were working directly against our corporate strategy. Our strategy prevented the project from realizing success -- we either support the project or drop the strategy. Why didn't anyone think of this?

Thinking of the company, looking out for corporate strategy, is in every employee (and consultant)'s best interest. The days of blindly mandating decisions, and blindly following orders, are long over. You only have to download this episode of Frontline to see what happened to RCA. It's a tragic story, sad mostly because it was entirely preventable. A company who departs from the strategy that made it successful in order to drive growth at any cost is a company destined for a colossal flameout.

If you only look at your own domain of responsibility, and don't look to see how that domain fits within the overall organization, you will fail yourself as well as your organization. You will fail to do great work, if you don't work on problems that are important for the organization's future.