Good leaders know you can’t fight reality
hbr.org
hbr.org
As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. TFA isn't really about markets, but the same principle applies. People aren't rational, and can deny reality indefinitely.
The reckoning comes eventually, but even when it does, it's almost always messy and unclear. You're practically never forced to admit that you're wrong, even if it's obvious.
Going with reality is the safe bet. But real winners, and real leaders, can look for an edge by skirting the safe bet. Maybe reality will slam them in the face for it, but it may not. If it always did, we wouldn't have to write articles about it.
People are rational by nature, but they can either choose irrationality because pride stands in the way of accepting the truth, or because of some mental defect or error.
> Going with reality is the safe bet. But real winners, and real leaders, can look for an edge by skirting the safe bet. Maybe reality will slam them in the face for it, but it may not. If it always did, we wouldn't have to write articles about it.
No idea what you're claiming here with this mumbo jumbo. Reality is nonnegotiable. It's already here. It doesn't consult with us. You can't skirt it because it is the case. What you can do is skirt something undesirable by acknowledging that things as they are are headed in the direction of the undesirable and change course, or repair after you've gotten into a undesirable place.
A way out would be to allow some perception of objective reality alongside all the filtering. We are supposedly part of that objective reality after-all.
A lot of leaders sink because they mistake their vision for the world, and then block out uncomfortable information that they really need to pay attention to in order to make their vision come true.
Thats an example of some one who failed at leadership. gp comment is misleading cuz its talking about people who get away with something for sometime.
The problem was that a very senior individual got it in their head that this metric should exist and that people should care about it. After N years proving that no one cared was equivalent to saying this senior leader wasted N years of resources.
I find it really tiring to not being able to have an honest conversation with leaders. There are probably plenty of things that can be improved but first you need to accept reality before you can make meaningful changes.
I often feel that middle management is one big pyramid of people bullshitting each other constantly and people seem ok with that.
Contrast: "We need this by January." "No."
with,
"We need this by January." "Let's discuss the hiring process for the new team members we're going to need to accomplish that."
Then they will either say "no" (what you were going for all along), or they will say "yes" and give you more resources.
It is really quite rare to be asked for something that is truly impossible, usually it is merely impossible within the organizational boundaries you're used to working within. Also, people hate being told no but love saying it, so if you want a "no," you need to work out how it's going to be them saying it.
"We need this by January"
"Let's discuss the hiring process for the new team members we're going to need to accomplish that."
"We don't have the budget for hiring at the moment. If more headcount is truly necessary, you are welcome to use your salary to obtain it."
90% of the time, the project arrives lat, but there's no other major consequences and the manager points to this as evidence that you were padding your budget with superfluous resource. 9% of the time, you buy a new web server on your own credit card and the manager brags to his boss about coming in under budget. 1% of the time, catastrophe hits, the company goes bankrupt, and he tells everyone that call for a reference that your incompetence drove the company out of business.
If you think this is hyperbole, a previous employer stated that a competent sysadmin would never lose data, so back-ups were a waste of money and made admins pay for them out of pocket.
> 9% of the time, you buy a new web server on your own credit card and the manager brags to his boss about coming in under budget
I.... genuinely can't believe this is a common line. Companies do ask people to do ridiculous things in return for very little remuneration. But to fund the company yourself?
(I do get the point your making BTW but the example can't be real!)
> a previous employer stated that a competent sysadmin would never lose data, so back-ups were a waste of money and made admins pay for them out of pocket.
The first part of that sounds like the natural tech-illiteracy of a business leader; the second part says they don't believe their own schtick.
You're right that what I wrote did sound that way, but that's because my wording wasn't correct. No one was ever "forced" to pay for back ups. One guy decided that he wasn't going to pay for them himself. After a couple of years, his server went down and there was no back-up. The boss fired him for negligence and then sent the server off to an expensive data-retrieval company. Legal then began a lawsuit against him, asking for the cost of the data-retrieval to be repaid. Also, any time someone called for an employment reference, the canned response was "We're in the middle of a negligence lawsuit against him at the moment, so the legal department says that all I can do is confirm that he worked here."
Eventually, he reached a settlement with the company for about half of the data recovery costs. However, no other admin ever dared not making their own personal back-ups again.
You, sir or madam, are an evil genius. I'd like to have you on my side of the negotiating table...
The usual response is "Right now we don't have time/budget but we will look into it" and nothing gets done. But the deadline still stands.
My main complaint is that a lot of managers don't really work with their underlings on issues to improve things.
I recall a case many years ago when my employer had a networking issue at one of the branches where we could not get to a solution for weeks... until at one meeting with the outsourced provider reiterating that a proper fix was impossible, they started to explain why it was impossible, saying that they'd need to replace all the hardware along the route which would be extremely expensive. At which point we asked how much, they named a number, and it was easily affordable compared to the problems it was causing us so the issue was approved in the same meeting. And if only they had started with the same approach, we could have had it fixed right away instead of trying to fix an "impossible" issue for weeks.
At my place, I think its more CYA than BS. "See VP Person, i said it has to get done or else!" so its not my fault!
See The Gervais Principle: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
High rank doesn't want to deal with reality, so he will add 2 guys underneath who will absorb half the pressure each dealing with frictions and mishaps. Each layer wants to keep its status so they'll take some of the heat.
I am totally middle management :)
My sense is; at higher rank (i.e. those above me) the problems are more macro than micro and so are the motivations and consequences. Therefore reality is dealt with on a broader platform and you have people to deal with the detail.
That's why my bosses boss has to worry about what error will land him in jail, and I just have to care about delivering some quarterly goal or other.
(or in other words; that guy totally knows how hard it is to empower an organisation of 60+ engineering/product/agile folks to deliver consistently, but he doesn't really care because that's my problem)
That's why I said it's mostly emotional buffering. They know shit will happen one way or another, shielded by intermediate layers of authority (relying on the fact that rent is not free so lower classes aren't free to talk much.)
That said, lower layers aren't perfect. Lots of bad apples, liars, cons. But I believe all it would take is more honest, close to the ground interactions to solve this bad game theory setup.
What is different is the value framework, right?
The further down a hierarchy you go the more individual the problems become; therefore the guy at the top is never going to solve for N challenges, just the macro ones.
Yes, as in "You can fool the people, but you can't fool the laws of physics."
How many times they come down to operators (be it engineers or anything) and call for stuff to happen magically.
It's never "so on average you need 1 week, what could be improved so we only take 6 days ? anything we can change or add ?"
There's another, perhaps more insidious, variant of this when managers ask YOU "How long will X take?" It's often asked casually. But your answer, which you think reciprocates the casual-ness, is then taken as a hard deadline regardless whatever surprises pop up (even if the manager knows there's going to be curveballs). Failure to meet the deadline is then fully your responsibility. It's something that everyone learns sooner or later in their careers-- to not make casual estimates, EVER.
I lived the smaller scope as a software development manager in the subsidiary. Merit increases were minimal or non existent, annual layoffs were normal. My peers were passionate about the customers and continuing to support them even though it was clear from the C-level actions they cared nothing for the business. At my level there was a lot of anguish and consternation about the customers and business. As expected, the subsidiary started seeing a lot resignation as the most experienced people left, accelerating the decline. My team saw 75% attrition in 6 months. Customers started leaving.
The old saying "perception is reality" has some bearing here. I still ask myself, is this not the outcome the executive sought in this situation? I personally believe it was, no one could be that incompetent, could they?
It would certainly be incompetent to just keep investing in all declining product lines; it's a valid business strategy to buy (or build) a product with no long-term future and extract as much as you can before it collapses - the point of the business is not to sustain/operate products as long as possible, but to extract as much profit as possible from those products. Extra investment in a declining product might make the product last, say, two years longer - but will those last two years be profitable enough (as opposed to just self-sustaining) to repay that investment? Business always has to take care to not fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
It has been slowly shrinking over the decades. Customers need a viable migration path forward. The last thing customers want is a product that can do longer be used when it's a long standing part of their business process.
A thriving civilization brought democracy, the republic and free speech which allowed many improvements in society.
But civilization has improved so much, and religion has really taught us the world should be fair, we still have good vs evil ingrained in our thought system.
Evil is completely natural, so you can't bring progress if people refuse to investigate where there's evil.
When people are really able to understand the world is unfair by definition, and that fairness is the exception and not the rule, everything becomes much easier.
It should be renamed justly unjust world hypothesis.
Religion has taught us that a claim without evidence leads to suffering, oppression and mass murder.
I've been in a situation where staff was worried that a currency was going to be devalued, and "word on the street" was that there could be trouble after pay day if pay was in the wrong currency. My country financial controller made a quick decision: we don't pay in that currency, we pay in the one "the street" believes is safe. It didn't change anything for us as an employer, just kept our staff safe by being on the "right side" of reality. We left it to the embassy and national bank to fight the (losing) war trying to prop up confidence in the currency.
Determining whether a given situation can be changed or just needs to be accepted is a difficult challenge, one where there's not absolute formulas.
The main thing in these discussions is bosses or higher bosses tend to demand results regardless of the challenge of a situation. And oppositely, underlings often ask constantly for exceptions. So the word "reality" is great as rhetoric for justifying those things you can't or just don't want to change. Which to say all this discussion about how things should be framed and very little is "reality-reality", how the world is, since that's complex and difficult to be certain of. IE, saying "that's just reality" a good tactic to get out of tough binds.
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Effective leaders may be enormously determined, but they can still factually assess the details of the situation in order to understand what needs to change in order to change reality. Where a "reality distortion field" becomes a problem is when it undermines the leaders ability to observe and orient to the situation.
At the best of times a leader is at risk of setting up a situation where they are told what they want to hear. A CEO can always find someone willing to tell them "yes". It requires self discipline to avoid this pitfall, and it also requires judgement - sometimes your staff do develop tunnel vision and another voice is required.
This is not easy. The article paints a good picture of the problem, but doesn't really offer much in the way of actionable solutions.
The four cardinal virtue begin with prudence, and prudence presupposes humility. What is humility (the real meaning, not the common counterfeit meaning of false modesty)? It is a habitualized disposition to readily accept truth when you see it, without that inner rebellion and refusal to accept what doesn't conform to your desires. That habit puts you in alignment with reality which allow for prudence which is the ability to make good decisions based the prevailing reality you find yourself in. With prudence, it is possible to be just; with justice, courageous; with courage, temperate.
The absence of humility is pride, a rebellious and frankly infantile attitude toward the truth because it's not what you want. It is insanity achieved through immorality and the very basis for all immoral acts.
With the pervasiveness of belief in subjectivist "narratives", constructivist thinking, indifference to the truth (characteristic of bullshitters), and all sorts of stupid New Age-y superstitions that revolve around the preposterous notion that you can create your own reality, I am not surprised the obvious needs to be stated.
To place truth above all things, above ourselves even, and our conformity to it, are our moral obligation and essential to the good life. If your car is headed toward a cliff, imagining you're in an airplane won't save you from the fall, and it won't help lashing out at those who warn you of where you're headed.
That being said, the author is a consultant for large cap corporations with rigid cost structures and well defined business plans. I mention this because this forum is primarily startup focused. You always need some amount of err, "hopium" to struggle through the initial phases. Accepting reality isn't necessarily in your best interests. Businesses have different life cycles, the growth phase compared to the mature/sunsetting phase of a business are vastly different. The author is a consultant that has worked primarily on the latter.
found it: https://wiki.c2.com/?FiveStagesOfGrief
Denial - Anger - Bargaining - Depression - Acceptance