Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Leadership Meeting: Finding the Virus

I'm meeting with some people today on leadership issues. I've a variety of things to discuss with them and yet there is always one to recommend:

First, do no harm. Identify current practices that erode trust and harm effectiveness and squelch those immediately.

If positive practices are layered on top of negative ones, then the positive ones will be weakened and the overall message will be mixed. People will think that the boss has picked up a nice-sounding concept or two at some management workshop but the old system remains in place.

Identifying the negative practices is not as easy as it sounds because - as I've often ranted about on this blog - they are tucked within positive ones. They can lurk, like a virus, and emerge at points of vulnerability. Finding them requires a form of introspection that is both thorough and brutally candid. It can be difficult to admit that practices in which pride is taken and which once brought success have become negative. If that is not done, however, then the other positive actions may be merely cosmetic.

In short, part of my work is that of an organizational diagnostician.

Bring on the x-rays!

3 comments:

CincyCat said...

Sometimes this sort of virus lurks under familiar practices.

Sometimes it lurks inside familiar people.

These people deliver results, but they are also completely and totally toxic to the teams that they work with.

Michael Wade said...

CincyCat,

I agree.

They can also drive off good people.

Michael

Bob said...

The worst virus is the envy virus, has many symptoms all of which are negative, mostly incurable, death can be very slow and painful, can infect others.