‘It flows downhill

I remember jetting once from Sacramento to Seattle, daydreaming over a sea of clouds, when the waves of whirling mist crashed abruptly on what appeared to be mountainous islands just outside the window. They were the peaks of the Cascades, violently replacing my tranquil fantasy with the rocky reality of a not so vacant treacherous sky.

That might be how some bosses feel; working so hard to climb to the top and not always knowing what perilous step will bring them falling from grace. But as much as managers can feel like castaways sequestered to far off mounts, no one is an island – especially not in an organization. Even the most subtle of emotional expression affects those below.

As someone wise once told me, “Shit flows downhill”. Imagine life as a stream, each of us bucketing out a small amount of social interaction and emotional support to survive, dumping back our psychological waste. Anything we throw in that flow affects the person downstream. And, if it’s a harsh word or nasty look, it washes over them without escape.

Of course they try to throw it back but often only with a little waste of their own, in turn affecting those further downstream. And while the strongest among us absorb it, ignore it, change it into something else, those of such emotional awareness and maturity are rare. Instead the pollution in the stream grows and affects more the further it flows.

These overly colorful analogies illustrate why I think it’s so important that people learn how they affect others; how to constructively deal with their feelings, particularly on the job, specifically if they’re the boss. The little that those at the top contribute to any mess has a tendency to clog the system with not only their own waste but that of their affected subordinates.

(Thanks to one of my Facebook followers for sending the above photo to me.)

Moving on up

The award ceremony

Annals of Improbable Research, the science humor magazine of Harvard, annually awards what it calls the Ig Nobel prizes “for serious scientific research on topics that seem anything but serious” (Beast, 2010).

This year, a group of Italian physicists won the Management Prize after mathematically proving that random promotions within a company actually made it run more efficiently. Here’s an excerpt from the work of Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy (Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72):

In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: {‘Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’}. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counter intuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.

Check out their research here: The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study.

Peter was right; too many managers are promoted simply because they’ve reached a certain organizational level and or their upper-management no longer knows how to reward them. And, it seems simple randomness would at least put a few people into play that actually possess the temperament and acumen to pull their teams and organizations to success. There is after all some order in chaos. But I have to ask, wouldn’t it be better to only promote individuals with those necessary managerial skills, and or ability to be trained? Perhaps someone will study that next.

Motivational Madness

Over the past 10 weeks, we’ve come to accept that everyone can’t be relegated to convenient stereotypes for our emotional consumption and that they possess valid perspectives just as important as our own. Consequently we’ve also learned to put our own egos aside and decided completing the task at hand is more important than our personal agendas.

We’re growing, changing, using our language skills more effectively, and accepting others. And, then the organization is likely to reward us for all this. Now the key is to know what exactly motivates others. Because let’s face it, after understanding ourselves, understanding others is even harder. Why do employees react one day one way and the next day another.

To make it more complicated, we need to realize that different people have different hot buttons. Along those lines, there are numerous working theories on how individuals operate in the work place. For example, Attachment Behavior Theory explains the bonds we enter into based on our childhood relationships and Bowen Family Systems describes our interaction with others based on our familial birth order.

This is just to name a few. There are numerous others not having anything to do with family. Culture, ethnicity, hormonal chemistry, etc, etc can all influence how people relate to each other. So what is a manager to do? Even with a psychology degree, it would be near impossible to diagnose each and every employee in order to most effectively manage them. Luckily, I argue you don’t have to.

The bottom line is to simply know that people have differing motivations, specifically from your own. Once you accept that, the teachings of react less, balance more, and communicate better build upon themselves. The most important idea to take away from this blog is that your perspective is not always THE perspective. You don’t always need to know your employee’s hot buttons as much as acknowledge that they have them.