Uniformity’s Curse
If organizations exist to unite diverse perspectives, capabilities, and talents in pursuit of common purposes and mutually beneficial results, why do they stifle diversity, seek sameness, discourage individuality, promote conformance, reward uniformity, and punish nonconformity? Because managing diversity is harder than managing uniformity — managing diversity is more challenging, expensive, time consuming, demanding, stressful, and prone to fail. Managing uniformity requires little more than an authoritarian hierachy, strict enforcement of procedures and performance standards, command and control management styles, and a conforming workforce — the allure of uniformity lies in its ease of administration, stability and predictibility, efficiency of operations, low cost and on-budget performance, minimal volatility with few surprises and quickly conforming culture. However, an abundance of research and experience shows that organizations and work environments with high levels of required uniformity inevitably stifle creativity and innovation, retard initiative-taking, prevent widespread accountability for results, limit freedom to expand and create value, and weaken individual motivation, commitment and fulfillment. A truly diverse organization or work environment, on the other hand, unified through common vision and purpose is healthy, strong, innovative, dynamic, and capable of blending a multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, and abilities, and it is able to weather significant competitive challenges.
An abundance of diversity exists in nature until it’s altered. An untouched acre of ground in Maine, for example, may contain up to 10,000 different varieties of tree and plant life. Such diversity is not only inspiring and beautiful, but also ecologically robust. If you were to level an unharmed acre of ground in Maine, removing all indigenous plant life and then letting it sit untouched, new growth would bring less than 10 percent of the former diversity in terms of tree and plant life. The trees and plants that first gain root in the newly leveled ground would dominate the space, preventing additional diversity from developing. Once removed, diversity rarely returns on its own. The uniformity mandate of the dominant species makes it impossible for diversity to flourish naturally. The lesson for modern organizations and their management teams is obvious: Diversity must be carefully and constantly nurtured, because creating an organization is a lot like leveling ground. Both activities create new space where the initial staffing or first species will attempt to dominate and control diversity. The very act of establishing and staffing an organization begins a process of limiting diversity, unless diversity is genuinely valued and vigilantly nurtured. Diversity by definition is the attempt to bring together competing interests into a single whole, Without constant nourishment, vibrant and productive diversity will eventually fade into ineffective, unfulfilling uniformity. Organizations with high levels of uniformity are ineffective and stagnant — ultimately producing inbred corporate cultures that lack the new perspectives, pioneering capabilities and fresh ideas necessary to survive. That is the curse of uniformity.
Wal-Mart: Guilty or Praiseworthy?
Is Wal-Mart’s leadership team guilty of management malpractice because of the company’s alleged discriminatory employment practices, inequitable and low wages, meager health benefits and questionable environmental record; or are they praiseworthy for preventing management malpractice from occurring or recurring by offering employees new and improved health insurance options, appointing an executive ombudsperson to address women’s issues such as equal pay, and renewing its commitment to environmental sustainability? Management malpractice or Praiseworthy management? Remember, management malpractice occurs in every organization because organizations are composed of imperfect, biased and egocentric people, so the crucial question is what happens in an organization when management malpractice does occur? Is it recognized, openly and honestly? Is it exposed, thoroughly and broadly? Are steps taken immediately and convincingly to prevent it in the future? How would you rate Wal-Mart’s management? Guilty or Praiseworthy? If you’d like to weigh in on this question, go to our forum and express your views.
Warner-Lambert
In an effort to find new ways to expand sales of key drugs, Warner-Lambert, now owned by Pfizer, persuaded doctors to prescribe its epilepsy drug Neurontin for other ailments. Selling Neurontin as a remedy for other ailments may have seemed like “out-of-the-box” thinking when it began, but one employee, David Franklin, thought otherwise. He filed a lawsuit against the company for defrauding Medicaid. He settled out of court with Pfizer for $27 million. Rethinking the world can be bad for an organization when short-term demands turn it into manipulative scheming. Where’s the malpractice? Building commitment to rethink the world when all you really want is for people to rethink their own behavior and priorities in order to conform them to the organization’s short-term agenda. This management malpractice has emerged because short-term performance is valued over long-term value creation.
Risk Taking in Risk Averse Environments, Sound Familiar?
“Too much uncertainty. That’s just another lame excuse for their damn risk aversion. Too much uncertainty,” Graham said as he sat across the table from his best friend, Mason. Graham had started his own microvalves and micropumps business five years earlier, turning it into a $10 million enterprise and then selling it to PATCO Industries, a $2.5 billion company, last year. PATCO executives asked Graham to stay on as VP of new ventures and charged him with finding new opportunities for growth from inside the company by exploiting, extending, or redirecting existing product lines and businesses.
“You really have to question their commitment,” Mason said.
“Exactly.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t know yet,” Graham said.
“What was their reasoning on the project before this one?”
“Too long before cash flow.”
“Why did they keep you on anyway?” Mason asked.
“They keep telling me to be patient—large corporations move slowly.”
“I thought they wanted you to accelerate new product and business development?”
“That was the plan, but one more day like today and I’m done.”
“I don’t blame you. Life’s too short.”
“I should’ve known better. Large companies have too much baggage, too much bureaucracy, too many biases, too many decision-makers, too much analysis, too many rules and regulations, too many hurdle rates, too many processes … no wonder people get pissed off at big business. Hell, I’m pissed off, and I work for one.”
“It’s almost as if they’re trying to break you,” Mason said.
“That’s exactly what they’re trying to do. They even said it.”
“What?”
“Yeah. This job is supposed to refine and temper my freewheeling entrepreneurial ways . . . to make my skills applicable within a large corporation.”
“You’re not serious?”
“I’m absolutely serious. They take great pride in their ability to limit and minimize risks. Then they hire me to, and I quote, ‘increase risk-taking and entrepreneurial decision-making.’ Go figure,” Graham said. “The only advantage of a large corporation is the capability to take greater risks that lead to greater breakthroughs . . . these guys don’t get that.”
“I think you should start another business.”
“That may be where this is headed,” Graham said as he wearily took a sip of his drink.
Learning: Nurtured or Frustrated?
Everything that happens in an organization either nurtures or frustrates learning. Everything. Every action. Every communication. Every policy. Every procedure. Every strategy. Every plan. Every system. Every process. Every program. Every person. Everything. Learning can only be nurtured through honesty, openness, encouragement, flexibility, humility, forgiveness, and trust. Learning can always be frustrated by manipulation, wariness, criticism, rigidity, arrogance, blame, and suspicion. The secret to cultivating a passion for learning lies in doing more things to nurture it than to frustrate it. It’s a daily challenge. Learning in most organizations is more often thwarted than nurtured, making employees reluctant to admit weaknesses, inadequacies, mistakes, and the need for improvement. A common management malpractice is to publicly promote a passion for learning while privately pursuing courses of action that frustrate it. You cannot encourage a passion for learning and then prevent people from applying what they’ve learned. People want to take action on what they learn, but organizations often make it difficult for people to do so because of standing traditions, established policies, inflexibility, or stupidity. So what’s the remedy? Discover what accelerates, facilitates, informs and nurtures learning, and then apply what works best. Everyone has different talents, approaches, and rates of learning. Some people learn best through experience; others learn through example, practice exercises, conceptualization, reading and writing, theory, audio/visual aids, training, or multiple approaches and mediums. Use them all, but make sure you learn what works best for the people who report directly to you. After that, make sure you help others in the organization discover and implement the most effective learning styles and approaches for themselves and the people who report to them. Learning can become a passion for everyone in your organization if you broaden and deepen the learning approaches and styles embraced by your organization.
The Search for Meaningful Work
The number of employees in today’s organizations who are asking questions such as “What am I doing here? What do I really want from my work? Is this the right career for me? What would I rather be doing?” increases annually. The search for meaningful work is obviously intensifying. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts and author of the bestselling Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, writes the following: “Personal meaning is the key to employee, manager, and executive retention. The search for personal meaning is a key factor in today’s high employee turnover. Most careers begin with a desire for personally fulfilling work that is also financially secure. Even people who stumble into their chosen field, or who take it up because of family pressure, tend to start out feeling that the work itself has value. Too often, however, this initial vision gets lost amid the heavy workload, paperwork, tight budgets, rigid regulations, and uncertainty associated with many industries.” Surveys conducted by The Wall Street Journal and ABC News indicate that more than 50 percent of workers in the United States would choose a different type of work if they had a chance. The failure of today’s organizations to provide meaningful work is not only fueling the rise in entrepreneurialism but also the war for talent. This battle for talent will become more intense over the next decade as baby boomers start to retire from the work force in droves, leaving the ranks of Generation X only able to fill about 50 percent of positions. Companies that don’t see the value in providing meaningful work for their employees will have little to worry about — their competitors will do the job for them.
Wegmans
For eight years in a row Wegmans, a grocery store chain in the Northeast and Atlantic states, has appeared on Fortune magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies To Work For. This year the company topped the list as the #1 best company to work for in America. How do they do it? By providing superior customer service through committed and knowledgable workers. People come first at Wegmans according to Chairman Robert Wegman, “We’ve always believed that the path to great customer service begins with treating our own employees right. If our people feel valued and supported, they will give their best to our customers.” Here are the top 10 reasons why Wegmans’ 32,000 employees love working for the grocery chain: Team Spirit , Innovative and Progressive, Friendly Work Environment, Growth Opportunities, Work Life Balance, Community Involvement, Competitive Pay & Benefits, Culinary Creativity & Superior Fresh Products, Scholarships and Other Educational Programs, and FUN. Not surprisingly, there’s no management malpractice at Wegmans and if it ever creeps in, it gets eliminated fast. The result? Company growth and profitability are exceptional, and the employees are elated. Take a look for yourself at www.wegmans.com, better yet visit a Wegmans next time you’re in one of the Northeastern or Atlantic states — see what a no management malpractice environment looks, feels, smells, sounds and tastes like.
Most Valuable Assets?
Management malpractice has always been the most dangerous threat to an organization’s most valuable assets — it’s people. And yet, people in most organizations put up with one management malpractice after another on a daily basis. What is it that managers and leaders aren’t getting about how to handle an organization’s most valuable assets? Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has written numerous articles and books on building high performance cultures, achieving extraordinary results through ordinary people, increasing profits by putting people first and unleashing the power of the work force. He writes a monthly management column called “The Human Factor” for Business 2.0. Here are a few of his thoughts on the topic, “It appears that the old aphorism, ‘people are our most important asset,’ is actually true. Compelling evidence suggests that organizational success comes more from managing people effectively than from attaining large size, operating in a high-growth industry, or becoming lean and mean through downsizing — which, after all, puts many of your most important assets on the street for the competition to employ. But while many leaders believe that putting people first makes strategic sense, all too few of their organizations do it….The scarcest resource in most organizations is time and attention — what leader has enough? Time spent focusing on one thing cannot be spent on others, and too often quarterly financial results crowd out the long-term management of people. Leaders of truly successful organizations — such as Whole Foods Markets, Southwest Airlines, the Men’s Wearhouse, and AES Corporation — see their role as systems architects, engaged in the critical task of building values, cultures, and a set of management practices that enable the recruitment, retention, development, and motivation of outstanding people. They also engage in the important work of building work practices that ensure that the ideas of all people become known and used.” Time and attention to people–their performance, their satisfaction, their ideas, their motivation, their insights, their sense of meaning and fulfillment, their disappointments, their match with their jobs, their growth and development, their sense of belonging, their contributions, their dreams, their fears, their needs, their desires to create value, their struggles, their weaknesses, their yearnings and strivings, their personal lives, their interactions with coworkers and customers, their teamwork, their results, their well-being — that’s the key to preventing management malpractice in organizations.
Employee Dissatisfaction
As reported in Business & Legal Reports, the Gartner Group, Inc., claims, “70 percent of enterprises that do not recognize and minimize employee dissatisfaction will have to fend off legal actions and public relations disasters caused by poor service, poor quality and poor business practices. Enterprise executives, especially those in high-pressure technology and knowledge-based companies, should understand the correlation between employee mistreatment and business disruption.” Yes, they should, but many do not. According to Diane Tunick Morello, vice president and research director at Gartner, “Executives and managers who see their companies engaging in mistreatment of employees should raise a warning flag and begin to quantify and qualify the risks to attracting staff, maintaining service, building a customer base and broadening business. Executives who ignore or downplay the connection between employee mistreatment and business turmoil put their employees, customers, partners and shareholders at risk.” Malpracticing management represents a HUGE RISK that most executives and organizations today don’t fully recognize. Wake up! Your people are not going to put up with such executive neglect, ignorance and denial for much longer.
Leadership Truths or Dangerous Lies?
Great management principles developed and honed by leading companies–such as Coca-Cola, Rubbermaid, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, 3M, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, General Electric, Intel, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, Berkshire Hathaway, Southwest Airlines, IBM, the Home Depot, J.P. Morgan, and Dow Jones, all of which have appeared at least five times on Fortune magazine’s annual list of America’s most admired companies during the past twenty years–are emulated by thousands of organizations throughout the world for both good and ill. The good, of course, stems from the unifying and galvanizing effect of great management principles and strong corporate values on people and corporate cultures. The ill, on the other hand, arises when managers and leaders fail to practice these principles, or practice them inconsistently, resulting in work cultures of contradiction and absurdity that can turn leadership truths into lies—lies that, if left unexposed and uncorrected, constitute management malpractice. However, once the malpractice is exposed, leaders and teams and individuals can work together to restore the value and integrity of these principles. The principles can be reinstated and, if necessary, adapted and applied in a way that is realistic and effective in today’s competitive marketplace. Thus, a great principle regains its timeless and universal authenticity not simply because it’s a nice sentiment, or the “right” thing to do, but rather because it reflects the current business reality. Great management principles and strong corporate values then become more than aspirations or lofty goals in mission statements that are read once a year at the company meeting. They instead become strategic practices that are executed tactically and operationally at all levels of an organization. They become principles and values that allow you to take your organization to new heights deserving of “most admired organizations” status.
Diversity? Not Here, Not Now! Sound Familiar?
“Did you hear what happened to Rick?” Beth asked as she popped into Sharon’s office and closed the door behind her.
“No. Did he quit?” Sharon asked, her eyes alive with anticipation.
“He was fired.”
“You’re kidding. For what? Speaking his mind?”
“They told him he wasn’t a team player.”
“That’s such bullshit,” Sharon said. “The only thing they want around here is a bunch of sycophants.”
“I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with this place,” Beth agreed.
“Idiots! They tell us to be open and candid, think outside the box, share our unique talents, take initiative, mirror the diversity of our clients—then they screw us whenever we do.”
“Organizations are always that way. They tell you how much they want you to contribute your unique point of view, to be yourself, then they slowly force you to become like everybody else,” Beth said as she opened the door to leave Sharon’s office.
“Only if we’re stupid enough to stay,” Sharon said.
They both laughed, albeit somewhat nervously.
Dreaming and Imagining
Most large organizations today are complex, convoluted, impersonal, and often demeaning environments; however, they also are outlets where people can do incredibly creative work and turn their imaginings into bold new realities. The challenge lies in overcoming the enormous negatives associated with organizational life in order to exploit the incredible positives. Sadly, few organizations overcome the negatives because they create structures, systems, and processes that are inflexible and stifling—working environments where people DO NOT feel comfortable, confident and rewarded for dreaming and imagining that anything is possible. Winston Churchill said it well: “First we shape our [structures], thereafter they shape us.” Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, described the dilemma this way: “We have all spent much of our lives in institutions that force us to be someone who we are not. We manage appearances. We commit ourselves to the company’s agenda. We act professionally. After a while, we have lived so long in the house of mirrors that we can easily mistake the image we are projecting for who we really are.” Have you lost your ability to dream and imagine? Is your organization making you someone you don’t want to be? Start dreaming and imagining more on the job, both you and your organization will benefit enormously. Imagining that anything is possible requires a totally new approach to organization and management—one that truly encourages every individual to dream about and imagine how they can do their job better, create more value and find more personal meaning and fulfillment. Let your employees reinvent their jobs every day, as long as the organization’s goals are being met and economic value is being created. Such efforts take serious commitment. Remember, encouraging your employees to brainstorm, dream, and imagine new products, processes, and ways of doing business without allocating sufficient priority, time and resources for such activities is nothing more than management malpractice.
Wonder Bread?
When Wonder Bread’s maker, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, filed for bankruptcy, executives blamed the nutrition craze and low-carbohydrate diets for Wonder Bread’s demise—turning one of the world’s best-known brands into a “has-been.” What a poor excuse for failing to meet customers’ changing needs while harvesting a cash crop! Bright white bread in a multigrain market just wasn’t working anymore, but no one did anything to build on Wonder Bread’s brand position to meet customers’ new needs. Interstate Bakeries’ malpractice? Professing a commitment to solving customer problems while maximizing sales from products and services that solve old problems and ignore new ones. Management malpractice adversely affects customers and shareholders as well as employees. This particular malpractice has grown because problem minimization is valued over problem maximization. Organizations attempt to minimize problems, which leads to ignoring, denying, and covering them up. When it comes to solving customer problems, the more problems you find, anticipate, and invent, the better.
Back to the Question of Why?
Why does management malpractice occur so often in today’s organizations? Here are four reasons why it has become so prevalent.
First, as I wrote in blogs on August 29 and September 8, people in organizations are, at times, biased, egotistical, narrow-minded, thoughtless, dogmatic, insensitive or otherwise flawed. Okay, so we’re all prone to malpractice management even though we all suffer from it. Yes, which is why it’s going to take a widespread revolution to stop this growing epidemic of management malpractice—it happened to me, so I might as well do it to others.
Second, management is malpracticed because it’s easier, cheaper and faster to malpractice management than it is to well-practice management, especially during times of crisis and extreme change. Tyrannical, authoritarian, command and control approaches to management are always easier, cheaper and faster in the short term but they destroy freedom, creativity, motivation and organizational cultures in the long term. Vigilantly practicing great management principles takes time, effort and commitment; but the pay-off is huge—take a look at the results delivered by Fortune’s most admired companies. Why are they so admired? Because great organizations don’t persist in malpracticing management. When malpractices do creep in, as they always do, they are quickly addressed and eliminated.
Third, because of the heightened stress and strain associated with today’s business environment–extreme complexity, radical change and savvy competition–managers and leaders too often lose their focus on fundamental principles and core values because urgency overshadows importance, hard drives out soft and information obscures interpretation. In other words they get distracted, sidetracked and diverted from one of the things that matters most—i.e., the ongoing motivation, performance, creativity, satisfaction and well-being of their people. A crisis comes along and all of the so-called great management principles and excellent organizational values get thrown out the window or are temporarily ignored in favor of hard-edged, results-at-any-cost management—whatever it takes to get the crisis resolved is a common excuse for management malpractice.
Fourth, people in organizations are continually growing, developing, and, to one degree or another, striving to become more effective, complete and balanced as managers and leaders. Consequently, most managers and leaders are still incomplete and unbalanced in their discharge of management responsibilities—e.g., heart, mind and body are often out of balance or fail to function as a complete whole, either there’s too much rational analysis at the expense of heart-felt empathy or vice versa or there’s too much talk and not enough action or vice versa or too much preoccupation with the short-term at the expense of the long-term or vice versa and so on. Becoming more complete and balanced as a manager or leader is vital to seeing, exposing and preventing management malpractice. Organizational cultures either hasten or hinder managerial and leadership development.
Openness, Honesty and Facing Reality
In the almost 25 years since publication of the first bestselling business book devoted to identifying the practices of excellent companies - Peters and Waterman introduced In Search of Excellence in 1982 - there have been many thousands of books and articles on how to create excellence in management and organizations, including my own books and articles beginning with Creating Excellence in 1984 (Hickman and Silva). Despite all the examples and insights and guidance from excellent organizations, great leaders and competent consultants shared ever more universally via the internet; management malpractice in organizations has increased. Workers have become more dissatisfied and disengaged. Cynicism and distrust are now the norm in too many organizations. Why? It seems that great examples, best practices and wise advice are not enough to stop managers and leaders in today’s organizations from demeaning, manipulating, deceiving, oppressing, abusing or otherwise injuring their people. The growing abuse of power, knowledge and relationships and the widening gap between the preaching and practicing of excellent management principles clearly indicate that something more is needed. A lot more. But what? Open, honest, and no-nonsense facing up to the truth—management malpractice in most organizations is rampant and out of control. And we’re not going to fix the problem unless we face the reality, no matter how ugly. No, I’m not advocating that we focus only on the negative, succumb to the blame game, constantly complain and whine, or needlessly vilify our institutions. I’m advocating that we develop stronger individual and collective abilities to SEE and EXPOSE management malpractice in all of its forms in order to PREVENT it from happening again and again in the future. It’s a question of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now is the time for all of us to get more open, more honest and more real in our organizations than ever before!
The Next Economic Crisis: Talent Flight
Is the U.S. losing its competitive advantage as the best developer and nurturer of innovative, entrepreneurial, artistic talent? Economist Richard Florida, author of The Flight of the Creative Class, claims that “this global competition for creative talent will be the defining economic issue of the 21st century.” And the United States, “which has long been the preferred destination for the world’s top entrepreneurial, innovative, scientific, artistic and cultural talent…is for the first time losing this key historical advantage.” To read more about how the U.S. is falling behind in this global war for talent because of ineffectual immigration/visa laws, occupational/educational opportunities, scientific climates, lifestyle tolerances, social fabric and creative infrastructure, click here.
In the new global economy, creative knowledge workers are the key to competitive advantage and work environments that promote entrepreneurial freedom, sharing of ideas at all levels, creativity and innovation, workforce diversity, respect and trust, highly interactive and open organizational cultures, meaningful and fulfilling work and endless opportunities for growth and development are the keys to attracting, retaining and growing knowledge workers. There is no place for management malpractice in such environments, which is why we must eliminate it from our workplaces, our institutions and our communities. If we don’t, we risk both losing our best individual talent (physically or mentally or emotionally) and fueling our collective economic decline. To harness the creative power of all human beings, create work environments that thrive on diversity, cultivate vibrant and robust communities, and maintain openness to international influence, we must greatly reduce management malpractice in all of its destructive forms from our governments, our businesses, our communities and our personal lives.
Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s multibillion-dollar empire includes skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, resorts, commercial and residential properties, golf clubs, beauty pageants, real estate, and the hit TV show The Apprentice. He’s written several bestselling business books, appeared on many talk shows, and regularly finds himself in the press. He’s a classic American icon with plenty of advice on how to make it big in business, but his advice isn’t pretty. In his view, you must constantly look over your shoulder in business to avoid getting screwed, and you should never believe that anyone other than yourself has your best interest at heart. Trump argues that looking over your shoulder with a paranoid eye at everyone else inside the organization is the only way to protect yourself from all the potential abuse, exploitation, and betrayal lurking around. Organizational paranoia runs rampant in many of today’s organizations because great management principles such as creating environments where people feel free to raise concerns are preached but not practiced–i.e., management malpractice. Unfortunately, one thing is certain: raising concerns in a Trump organization will only be rewarded if Donald shares the same concern. Even then, he’ll probably consider your insight a little too predatory for comfort. Either way, you could, at any moment, expect to hear him say, “You’re fired.” Trump’s brand of paranoia can never promote the sort of open and candid discussion of concerns that permeates the best-run organizations. Is this also malpractice? Absolutely! Using the principle of encouraging people to feel free raising concerns as a paranoid ploy to get people to open up, so that their perspectives, attitudes, and intentions can be used to exploit them, manipulate them or prevent them from hurting you at a later date is definitely management malpractice. So we malpractice management on others because management is malpracticed on us. The absurdity must stop!
Work-Life Balance
There’s been a lot of rhetoric about work-life balance in recent years, but little has really changed—in fact, the situation is getting worse in many organizations. In a recent survey of hundreds of executives and managers across the United States, conducted by NFI Research, a global research firm based in New Hampshire, almost 70 percent of those surveyed believed that “the work-life situation of people in business was either somewhat or extremely unbalanced. Long commutes, full schedules, stressful demands, the tight economy, increased expectations and many other factors make it extremely difficult to achieve a balance between work and personal life.” A survey conducted by Massachusetts-based Discovery Group polled more than 50,000 employees in business organizations and found that more than 40 percent of the workers were dissatisfied with their work-life balance. According to Discovery Group CEO Bruce Katcher, this work-life imbalance “is due to long work hours, changing demographics, more time in the car, the deterioration of boundaries between work and home, and increased work pressure.” In short, despite the rhetoric from organizations about the importance of curtailing stress and improving work-life balance, the problem is getting worse, not better. Where’s the malpractice? Preaching work-life balance without doing what’s necessary to make sure it happens for employees in the organization. Or providing programs and benefits that support work-life balance and then discouraging employees from using them. Even though your organization may embrace the principle or value of work-life balance, if you don’t support it, reinforce it, and even require it when employees continue to disregard it, you’re committing malpractice.
The REAL Reason You’re Working So Hard and Long
BusinessWeek’s cover story this week, “The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard…And What You Can Do About It,” is insightful and helpful but the special report misses the REAL reason why people are working harder and longer these days—there’s a growing epidemic of MANAGEMENT MALPRACTICE in organizations everywhere. Yes, the article cites TOO MANY COOKS—“managers make up a much bigger share of the workforce than they did 15 years ago despite years of cutting corporate bloat”—and OUT OF CONTROL—“about 25% of executives at large companies say their communications (voice mail, emails, and meetings) are nearly or completely unmanageable”—as two of the reasons, but it doesn’t go far enough to uncover management malpractice as the biggest reason why so many of today’s workers feel overworked, burned-out and dissatisfied. This alarming rise in management malpractice makes it more and more difficult for workers to perform their jobs, learn and grow, coordinate with others, find meaning and fulfillment, create value and get results for themselves and their organizations. The consequence? Today’s workers have to work harder and longer to make up for management’s malpractices. What can you do about it? See it, Expose it, Prevent it. Coming soon to this website—new resources to help you become a revolutionary against management malpractice in your organization.
Bullied, Berated, Mocked and Demeaned
People are bullied, demeaned, berated, mocked, and denigrated in too many of today’s workplaces. At a recent American Psychological Association conference, psychologist Paula Grubb from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported a very disturbing finding—nine out of ten workplaces in the United States experience some level of uncivil behavior, verbal abuse, and bullying. In the first national survey of verbal aggression in the workplace, managers in a majority of the 516 surveyed companies admitted that a variety of bullying and berating behaviors—such as in-your-face verbal cuts, the silent treatment, demeaning jokes, backstabbing, scapegoating, and sexual harassment—were common in their organizations. The sad reality is that given today’s highly competitive business environment, constant fear of layoffs, and the aggressive corporate cultures of some industries and professions, the situation is getting worse in many organizations. Most people don’t know what to do about it, so more often than not they silently endure it. According to psychologists such as Paula Grubb, aggressive verbal and emotional abuse in the workplace fosters depression, insomnia, alcohol and drug abuse, and a general sense of dissatisfaction. The impact on the organization is lower productivity, staff attrition, reduced motivation, and diminished job satisfaction. Psychologist and University of Michigan professor Lilia Cortina, who has conducted three surveys of her own, notes that three out of four workers report their verbal or emotional abuse experiences—but not to senior executives, which means that top management doesn’t necessarily know what’s really going on in the organization on a daily basis. Only 3 percent of bullied or berated employees ever file a formal complaint because they often feel buried in layers of corporate hierarchy and figure that such treatment is part of life in modern organizations. Unfortunately, most abusers won’t change unless they are exposed. Expose them!