Archive for the ‘Team Building & Development’ Category

The End Justifies the Means…Or Does It?

Posted: June 5, 2012 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Team Building & Development
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“Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli 

While the exact phrase “the end justifies the means” is never found in Machiavelli’s renowned 1532 work, The Prince, there is absolutely no doubt this is one of the distilled philosophies that you come away with after reading it. I remember reading it in high school and being bothered by it, but in rereading it a few years back, perhaps because this is just the way the world – individually and collectively – with very very few exceptions does things now, my sense of bother had deepened to disgust and a conscious rejection of all the tenets and principles in the book. Machiavelli, it seems, would have fit right into the 21st Century with his promotion of situational ethics and relative morality or total immorality in every aspect of life.

This post is about ethics and process. Ethics is defined as “a system of moral principles;” and “the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group;” and “that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.” By “process,” I mean how and why we, individually and collectively, do things to achieve a desired outcome.

Let me say at the outset that ethics and process is a constant struggle, and many times we’ve absorbed so much of what’s going on around us – “that’s what everyone else is doing,” – and we live in an ADHD world that leaves us little free time – unless we make the conscious choice to create free time – to think through our processes – and we have adapted to a world philosophy that justifies being unethical to achieve goals (the mantra of this is “well, it’s not hurting anybody,” which we’ll discover is absolutely untrue, except the people getting hurt are not the ones we might think). Additionally, we’ve fallen into the trap of believing that the outcome of something is what is most important, not how we got there – that the end justifies the means.

It is my belief that how we got there is far more important and significant than the end result. If the process is wrong, flawed, faulty, deceitful, or in any other way dishonest, the end result is nullified. Because defects of character, a lack of integrity, and disregard for ethics characterizes the process. Some examples of this process-ethics problem on an individual level are things that as I read them I continually ask myself “is this something I’ve done, am doing, or would do?” I believe that being very aware of all my processes – and asking myself “is this right or is this wrong?” and “is it at its very core honest or dishonest?” – in life is critical to having right character and unimpeachable integrity, because, when it’s all said and done, those are the only things I will leave this life with. As Marc Antony so eloquently says in his eulogy of Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones:“

A story last week in The Atlantic about the housing bust had these two quotes from one of the investigators with Digital Risk, a company that exists solely to catch mortgage fraud. The first quote is a bit surprising: “pastors—dozens of them—who doctored bank statements, bought houses they couldn’t pay for, and then filed for bankruptcy. “’…The nice thing about pastors is that their church shares information when asked,’ Alpan says. ‘Pastors are always an easy [fraud] claim.'” The second quote seemed, to me, to sum up, in general, society’s, individually and collectively, default process: “‘It’s not just lawyers and pastors and CEOs who lie and scheme. It’s nurses and schoolteachers, too,’ he says. ‘Everybody’s guilty; no one’s up to any good.'”

How about the educators in Atlanta, GA who were involved in cheating on the state’s standardized testing, in which more federal funding – and teacher and administrator jobs – were at stake for low test scores? This is the epitome of a unethical and dishonest process being employed by individuals for a “good” – although in my opinion, keeping these educators in their jobs would not have been good for the students – goal. What kind of example did they set for the kids they were entrusted to educate? They taught them that cutting corners, cheating, and lying were acceptable if those behaviors achieved the end goal. Am I the only one who believes these kids took that lesson – and process – to heart and everything they do from here on out will be suspect, process-wise?

On an even more personal level, how many of us have fudged the deductions on our income taxes to either avoid paying or to pay less than what we legitimately owe in taxes? Many non-monetary charities – furniture, clothes, etc. – simply allow you to tell them the value of your donation and they sign it and give you the receipt. If we donated to one of these, were we honest about the value of our donation? Did we take other deductions that we weren’t allowed to or inflate the amount of other allowable deductions? That’s an unethical, deceitful, and dishonest process.

Our individual unethical and dishonest processes aggregate in the organizations we are members of professionally, socially, and religiously. Common and frequently-used examples  of how these processes look at the organizational level (and because I’ve been in technology – and often that includes being in the inner workings of organizations, especially as they have become inextricably linked over the course of time – since the beginning of my career, there isn’t much I haven’t seen and heard, but a lot I’ve had to say “no” to or, with time because my process, which is, to the best of my ability, to be honest and ethical no matter what, to simply not be asked even though the people who are asked and say “yes” end up talking to me about it and I tell them “don’t expect the people you’re doing this for to visit you in that federal penitentiary”) include:

  • Encouraging members of the organization to access the organization’s web site from as many unique IP addresses as they can on a regular basis to artificially drive up the traffic statistics and boost the organic search engine rankings
  • Encouraging members of the organization to post favorable online reviews of the organization’s products to create the illusion that lots of people want and like the products
  • Creating fictional web sites that purport to objectively compare your organization’s products with competing organizations’ products where your organization’s products are rated higher than all the others
  • Encouraging and/or having members of the organization to use social media contacts (who may or may not actually be interested in the organization or its products) to “like” the organizations’ social media pages to boost their search rankings

And technology is not the only area where we see the ever-increasing trend toward unethical, deceitful, and dishonest processes. There is rampant federal and state tax fraud. I know of one example where at least a year’s worth of financial documents was fabricated using PhotoShop to hide what had really been the true financial documentation of the organization. Even some charitable contributions have the dark shadow of unethical and dishonest processes behind them. A recent account was given by the chairman of an organization in which he detailed how he circumvented “the system” – which included evading costs and time doing it the honest and legal way would have required – to get a piece of medical equipment to a someone in a foreign country and it was all justified – Jeremiah 17:9 – because it was a “good deed.”  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s not hurting anybody, right? Wrong! There may not be identifiable victims of the fraud being perpetrated, but people who are counting on veracity are being defrauded. Additionally, the person/people executing the unethical, deceitful, and dishonest processes are definitely hurting themselves. Right character, good character, and integrity are much more easily destroyed than they are created. The first time we use an unethical, deceitful, and dishonest process, there is usually a pang of conscience that accompanies it – if indeed, we’ve developed any kind of conscience at all.

I’ve found that if I have to spend a lot of time debating on whether I should do something or not, process-wise, and there’s a knot in my stomach to accompany the indecision, then the wisest thing is stop and review my process for integrity, honesty, and ethical correctness. However, if we ignore the pang of conscience and do it the way we want to anyway, our character is damaged. The next time the wrong way to do something to achieve a goal presents itself, it will be easier to do, because the pang of conscience has been diminished. 

So why does it matter what the process is as long as the outcome is achieved? Because once this way of doing things comes into and is accepted in just one of our processes, it eventually spreads to all of our processes. We become what we think and act on: unethical, deceitful, and dishonest from the core outward. We become unreliable, untrustworthy, and unconscionable. We also become teachers, by our examples, that any means justifies the end, and we contribute to the declination of a society that we all resoundingly lament and criticize as being what we’ve become.

Take the time to examine your processes. The good that will come of that – including all the immediate gratification that you’ll have to forego to do things the right way – will be worth it now and in the long run.

The Most Quintessential Leader in My Experience

Posted: May 24, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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In my earlier post, The Most Unquintessential Leader in My Experience, I reviewed in summary form, the characteristics that made this person the antithesis of a quintessential leader. In today’s post, I will review the characteristics of the most quintessential leader I’ve had in my career. Much of what he taught me by example went over my head at the time – I encountered him on my second fulltime job out of college – but as time has passed, I find myself reflecting more and more on the invaluable lessons of quintessential leadership that he used and modeled for me and have tried to incorporate those in my own quintessential leadership.

Unlike the last post in which the unquintessential leader was nameless, I will name this person. He was Wayne Grovenburg. He died in a motorcycle accident in Oklahoma in 2000, so I’ve never gotten a chance to thank him personally for his great example, so this is my overdue tribute to his legacy as a quintessential leader.

I was hired by Wayne and another technical manager as a technical writer for a little – but growing – software company that had spun off from a larger long-established electrical components distribution company. The software had been developed in-house to handle the unique business cycle of a distribution company, but the executives of the existing company saw the potential of the need for this product by other distribution companies.

About half the employees were legacy employees with the parent company and about half had been hired when the new company started up. The person who had been writing the user documentation for the software was a legacy employee who was old compared to most of the other employees and had a quasi-marketing background. She wrote most of the marketing literature for the company and was involved in doing trade shows early on, but was phased out as the company looked for a more professional image.

The quasi-marketing person was my supervisor, but I reported ultimately to Wayne. The age difference between the quasi-marketing person and me was at least 30 years, so that alone set up the scenario for inevitable clashes. We were also both very intransigent when we believed we were right, so this added to the inevitability of butting heads. A lot. I was very young, very brash, and very confident in my knowledge and abilities. She was an aging employee who was, in the end, trying to keep a paycheck until she could retire and pursue her real interests, which were nebulous and ethereal. Her real interests were reflected in her writing style which didn’t sit well with my logical, down-to-earth, let’s-get-it done mentality. Another potential for conflict. She had no knowledge about technical writing; I had helped one of my college professors write a technical writing textbook while I was finishing up college, and I’d had about a year’s worth of experience working with real technical writers at a large software/hardware company, so I knew what I was doing.

Another technical writer was hired at the same time I was. She was a good bit older than me as well, but she had military technical writing experience, so we were okay together professionally.

My first day at work quasi-marketing person handed me one of the user manuals she had written and asked me to edit it. It was bad. I read the first of what we later covertly called “the Tony stories” and it was neither technical nor instructive. In fact, it was insulting from the perspective of the user because it basically explained the process of his or her job to them instead of showing how to use the software to do a job he or she already knew inside and out.

I grabbed one of the red pens I had gotten from the administrative assistants up front and got to work. When I handed the manual back to quasi-marketing person two hours later, she opened it up and immediately burst into tears seeing that most of the pages were bleeding with red ink. I had not expected an emotional response, but before I could even address that, she had run off to find Wayne.

Before she found him, though, she had tried to trash me, in hysterical tears by then, to almost everyone else in the company. Ironically, her first stop had been at the administrative assistants’ area. When I had met them all that morning, I made a point of noting their surroundings to see what was important to them, and had engaged in a little getting-to-know you conversation with each of them based on what I saw in their work areas. I knew, intuitively, that this group of people could make my time at this company pleasant or hell, and since I genuinely liked them, based on my brief interactions with them, I decided it was going to be as pleasant as I could make it.

Quasi-marketing person was also a bit of an elitist, so she talked down to the administrative assistants and also spent a good bit of time berating them. The only time she talked to them was when she had to, and there was no love lost between them and her (I got all of this in my introductions to them that morning). They, though, were the eyes and ears of the executives in the company, so I have no doubt the executives knew what quasi-marketing person was up to. Other than the president of the company, none of the rest of them had much use for her.

She finally found Wayne and went behind closed doors with him. I got a call from the administrative assistant to the president and she asked me to come up front (this began the pattern of how we would communicate when she was watching my back). When I got there, she and the other administrative assistants told me what happened and then said “Don’t worry. No one takes her seriously.”

After a couple more hours, Wayne came to my cube and asked me to go to lunch. We went and he gave me one of the most meaningful conversations and some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten professionally.

He wasn’t angry or upset with me. He wasn’t angry or upset with quasi-marketing person. But he realized that if the two of us could not figure how to tolerate each other without these flashfires – from her – every day, we’d get nothing done and he’d be spending all his time trying to referee between her and me, which meant he wouldn’t be getting his work done either.

He intuitively understood how to communicate with people and he was very effective in making his points without being critical or destructive to anyone. He also had that rare knack for knowing how to effectively communicate with each of his team members in spite of the diversity of our backgrounds and temperaments. And, of all the people I’ve worked for along the way, I never felt like I needed to put body armor on, even if the conversation was serious and I needed to make some changes for the good of the team and the company.

He made a very wise decision in putting the responsibility to keeping the relationship with quasi-marketing person in my hands. He knew that she was not going to change and that talking with her to help her see her deficits was an exercise in futility. So, in that lunch meeting, we had a heart-to-heart and he reminded me to stay focused on the company mission and on the big picture. He advised me to find less in-your-face ways of making changes – after all, that garbage that I’d read was exactly why he and the other technical manager hired me and he reminded me of that and the value they knew we were bringing to the company – and, if necessary, to go around her if I knew face-to-face could bring on an eruption (she was furious by the time she talked with him). He finished by reassuring me that I had his support and all of us, except her, were on the same page, but she was there because the president felt obligated to her, so I’d have to find ways to live with that and live with that peacefully.

Several things stand out in my mind to this day about that conversation. The first thing that Wayne did was refocus me on the big picture: the goal. Since I’m a goal-oriented person, this was the best approach he could have taken at the outset of the conversation.

The second thing was the balanced and gentle way Wayne discussed both my strengths and my weaknesses. Not once did I hear “you were wrong” come out of his mouth, but by the end of the conversation, I knew what I had done wrong and I knew what I needed to change.

The third thing that Wayne did was to engage me a participatory way in the process of keeping the peace while the necessary transition of redoing the documentation happened. By making me responsible for watching myself and giving me advice on what to do to help keep the peace, he made me his partner that day and it made a huge difference. I wasn’t just the new kid on the block, the youngest person in the company, but instead I was a full-fledged participant in the company and the team.

The fourth thing that Wayne did that made a deep impression on me was that he didn’t take sides. Not once did he bad-mouth quasi-marketing person to me, even though I suspect, looking back, that she was a thorn in his side, since she certainly was to almost every other person in the company. Whatever he felt personally about her, he kept to himself. And he made it clear that he would not put up with anyone disrespecting her. That was an ethical standard that I try to remember in my leadership today, because it can be a very hard thing to separate personal feelings from professional obligations.

The last thing he did was to end the conversation positively, making sure that I didn’t walk away from the conversation and lunch believing I was the worst person on the planet. He brought up some of the things that I could have done better or differently, which was exactly how he phrased it, and then gave me practical ways on how to do it better or differently – in effect, giving me tangible parameters within which to work that were acceptable to him and to the company to get the job done -, without attacking me or tearing me down. And in the end, he let me know that I had his support and everything was okay between us.

Unfortunately, that was not the last conflict quasi-marketing person and I had, but I took the wise and generous mentoring of the most quintessential leader I’ve experienced in my career, did my best to implement it and build his belief and trust in me, since he had already demonstrated that he had belief and trust in me, and eventually she was moved out of the department and out of the team.

Wayne’s gone now, but his lessons and his example resonate with me to this day. So I’m a bit late, my friend, but thank you!


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