2009...or 1984?

In the mid-1990s, political correctness ran amuck. Short people were no longer short, they were "vertically-challenged". It was no longer chairman, it had to be "chair person". The great movie PCU lampooned this brilliantly. The whole purpose of the PC movement was, I suppose to foster greater sensitivity about equality and discrimination; it got away from us for a while. And it hasn't gone way, but only gotten worse.

While our language should, at a certain level, convey sensitivity and equality, it should not hide the true meaning of something. That actually is entirely counter-intuitive to the purpose of language.

For instance, let's look at the term "fired". This is a word that carries meaning, and in no uncertain terms conveys exactly what is happening to someone's job, and all of the issues and problems that go along with it. It has power, and it has meaning.

Now, it may not accurately describe the situation when, for economic or any other reasons, a company is eliminating jobs to improve their bottom line. "Fired" means that you did something wrong and were told that you don't work somewhere any more, and its your own fault. OK, we need something else to describe when its not your fault, to take some of the sting and stigma away. So we have, "laid off".

Laid off has its own connotations, and none are really all that positive, but still, it has a little less stigma attached. Apparently, though, some senior executive somewhere felt that it wasn't watered down enough, especially in a situation where through mismanagement or a simple desire for lowered expenses, positions were eliminated. So this guy, probably from New York (because that's what they do there) came up with a new term that made executives feel better about taking away people's livelihood: down-sizing.

This, too, is not a bad term as it still describes what has happened, but it carries with it that the company may be scaling down production to meet a different customer need. Unfortunately, this is rarely true; this usually means that the people who are left will simply have to work harder to meet the same goals. However, it could be possible that the company was simply over staffed, as is wont to happen.

Some time in the last few years, the terminology took a side-step to a new term: right-sizing. See what they did there? They put a positive word in there: "right". "Its not so bad, is it? We're just making the company be the correct size. Oh no, that size does not include you." Once again, someone added a level of banality to what is a negative thing for the people affected and tried to make it more palatable for public consumption.

Yesterday, I have heard my absolute favorite bastardization of this term: "selected in a resource action". Wow. George Orwell could not have written a better Newspeak term for losing your job. A small sliver of positive thinking buried under a load of nonsensical action. Woo-hoo! I've been selected! Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Its this kind of approach which allows the less-adept (dare I say, "inept"?) leaders to make this disturbing decisions that they make, to not engage in positive employee development as they should. Communication is a tool used to expand and spread ideas, not obfuscate them.

Is there something to be said for directness. Yes. Is there something to be said for taking a more tactful, sensitive approach? Yes. Communication should fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, but if it is ever in question, one should cheat to the direct side a little more. It leaves less up for interpretation and confusion, and I guarantee, the results will be much better. It also shows that you are unafraid to stand by your decisions and beliefs and will face down challenges eye to eye.

And quite frankly, couldn't we use a little more directness from our leaders, now more than ever?

The Value of a Man

Sometimes, someone needs to say what needs to be said. On Wednesday, Gary Ackerman was that person.

There are two things that I love about this video.

1. Representative Ackerman is saying everything that everyone has wanted to say to these people, holding them accountable for not doing their jobs properly.
2. Watching the SEC folks squirm.

Leaders cannot delegate accountability. When you are put in charge, you get many benefits: higher pay, the ability to tell people what to do, maybe a nicer office, and possibly some more flexibility in your work day. But everything has its price, and the price of being a leader is responsibility. Even if a leader chooses to ingore their repsonsibility, it will eventually come back to collect. Every time.

This is not to say that the failings of a team could possibly be "blamed" on a select few, but my response to that is, "Who's responsibility was it to watch that person and make sure that they did their job?" The answer: the manager.

Unless the employee is engaging in illegal or underhanded activities and is either covering their tracks like D.B. Cooper or is a master Machiavellian, the responsibility always falls on the team leader for that person's performance. Leaders do not have the luxury of pointing fingers when things go wrong; when they do engage in that behavior, they look petty and incompetent.

Take Andy Reid, the coach for the Philadelphia Eagles, for instance. Whenever the team loses, the first thing he says (and the line that he sticks to) is, "I didn't prepare this team properly for the game. The fault lies with me." (And unfortunately for Andy, he has had to make this speech too often as of late.) As the leader of that team, he immediately assumes all of the blame for the team's shortcomings. Donovan McNabb, the quaterback, takes the same approach.

Now, this doesn't mean that behind closed doors, Reid doesn't start screaming at the secondary for their weak pass defense or take the receivers to task for not running their routes properly. If he does, though, it is behind closed doors, and then he focuses on fixing the problem. Like him or not (and he does have his flaws as a coach...where's the Eagles parade?), one has to admire his approach to leadership.

So here is the wake up call: remember that the next time your team doesn't perform up to standard, the next time that they fall short of their goals, ask yourself what you did to make sure everyone was performing up to snuff. Flog yourself for a while. Then fix it.

If I was in his district, Gary Ackerman would have my vote.

I am now going to go back and finish printing materials and stuffing envelopes for the Auspex marketing campaign that gets launched on Tuesday. This is a big week...Auspex is going live!

I only make this look easy

As I mentioned in my other blog, getting Auspex off of the ground is taking up a significant amount of my time lately. I didn't underestimate the fact that starting a business, any business, is time consuming and requires focus and dedication, but I don't think I fully appreciated just how many details I need to attend to just to make sure that I have built the best foundation possible. But I suppose that this is the price I pay when I say that I want to put my money where my mouth is. It is certainly a small price.

I'll give you a "for instance". As I was planning my product mix and break-even points in more detail today, I decided to offer an assessment via my website, and this was going to require an e-commerce solution.

As I have been starting Auspex up on a (very) limited budget, I have been searching for as many open-source and free options as possible, provided that they don't detract from the company's image. I was able to purchase my web domain and hosting through Go Daddy and ended paying less than $4 per month. I designed the website myself and created all of the images. E-commerce, though, was beyond my purview to create, so I had to seek some other options.

CoolerSmart uses osCommerce, so I figured that I would check that out. It is open-source and free, so provided that it worked properly, the price was right. I downloaded it and started the process of getting it uploaded, something that I figured would be a relatively pain-free process.

I was wrong.

I'm not sure if it was simply an issue with the way that I uploaded it, or there are issues between osCommerce and Go Daddy, but things did not go as smoothly as planned. I spent the majority of my afternoon trying to get the system up and running (while multi-tasking with more break-even analysis and updating Facebook). I went about fixing it several ways, but to no avail. I think that I will have to bring in some outside help on this one.

As I was trying to suss out the issues with the application, it dawned on me that most people will probably just go ahead and either pay for some kind of solution so that they don't have to think about it, or delegate this responsibility to an out-sourced firm. While I can understand the appeal in this, of getting the additional benefits of more time and fewer headaches (hopefully), I think that from my perspective as a budding entrepreneur that by passing this along to someone else I would miss out on a valuable learning experience. Not to mention, I can keep my bottom line down.

I want, nay, need, to know how things work. Its really the only way that things make sense to me, and if I don't, I feel genuinely uncomfortable. I, at the very least, need to have a basic working knowledge of something to have that discomfort to dissapate.

Part of it is my Type A, controlling side that just doesn't like to cede responsibility or control to anyone, something that I have to attempt to overcome almost daily to be effective. The other side is that I want to be able to have an intellegent discussion with someone should I ever have to have someone take over that responsibility. Its probably a trust issue.

I know, as I attempt to teach all of the managers that take my courses, that one of the tennants of management is being able to get work done through others, through solid delegation. At this stage, however, with it only being me wearing all of the hats, I relish the ability to learn so much about all aspects of the business. I know that eventually, I will probably have to begin begging off some of the responsibility of running every aspect of Auspex (if I don't, then I'm in real trouble); if an when that day comes, I think that I will be better for the experience and be able to avoid other pitfalls later when they could potentially cost more.

Oh, and I still get to keep that bottom line down.

-bw
Auspex Business Solutions

Manager, lead thyself...

First, I am quickly determining that I am really bad about keep up with a schedule when it comes to posting. This is something that I will have to remedy.

About a week before my job with CoolerSmart was eliminated, I had a bit of a brainstorm for running management and leadership workshops. I mentioned this to the wife as something that I wanted to start to develop just in case my training department was lopped off in another reduction in workforce move. Turns out that I was a bit prescient on this, as the job was eliminated a week later.

As I have been making moves for the last month to get all of my ducks in a row, I find that I am startlingly close to seeing my first round of workshops become a reality, something that simultaneously scares and excites me. But all of the standard, emotional drivel aside, it dawns on me that I also have to have a workshop prepared, polished and ready to go.

I have been trying to focus the presentation on hitting some key elements that will both create value for my customers and by poignant, something that is difficult to do given the time frame in which I want to deliver this. This is even more important for one of the workshops I am trying to run, a Greek Leadership Workshop for executive board members of sororities and fraternities.

So what is that one, key point that will really drive home how important it is that leaders take an active role in getting better? In thinking on this, I have come to one conclusion, the most important part of being a successful leader at any level:

You are never as good as you think you are. Get better.

Pretty simple. This is not to say that effective leaders are not confident people; quite the contrary, effective leaders must by very confident people. But that confidence has to be tempered with humility, else that confidence turns into blind arrogance, which is a dangerous position to be in.

This can also be one of the more difficult skills to master. For a leader to be able to check their ego at the door, listen to suggestions from multiple sources, give up credit, and be able to admit when they have made a mistake...well, it is no small feat. And most of us fail at this at least once a day.

The key is not to be perfect, but to realize that our own development will never end, and that we can always get better at our jobs. The only way to accomplish this is to realize that we make mistakes and that we are not God's gift to the world of management.

This was a difficult road for me to start down, but one that has made me much better at my job. I have been called a very confident person, bordering on arrogant at times. My first manager at REI had told me this because my "confidence", as she called it, was proving to be intimidating to some of the other managers and staff. This came as a surprise to me, as I have never considered myself a confident person. In high school, I was the guy who never asked out the girl, never got the phone number unless I was sure that she liked me.

When I first got his feedback, I brushed it aside as my manager being just flat wrong and that there was no possible way that I was arrogant (which is a rather arrogant attitude to take, ironically). Looking back, though, I can see how this was true and how this affected my ability to connect with my staff and be able to take criticism.

I had (and still have) a tendency to bull-headedly push forward when I think I'm right, and I approach most situations from the position that I am right. This, to a certain degree, I think has made me a better leader, because it means I have the stubborn streak to get things done. But what I have found is that when I allow for other possible outcomes, when I allow for the fact that I may be wrong (from time to time), that there is a much better connection with the people that I work with and that people are more willing to cede to my arguments (which, as we have established, as mostly right).

This was a hard pill to swallow, that I wasn't Mr. Popularity, that I wasn't the Patton of retail managers. It turns out that I was less Patton and more Michael Scott. The truth is that most of us, at least from time to time, are prone to reenacting scenes from Office Space. The only way for us to improve to to realize that we are never as good as we think we are. There is always something that we can get better at, and we can find it if we check our ego at the door.

-bw
www.brian-wiggins.com/auspex