As a leader, your mission is twofold: eliminate problems that are moving your civilization away from profit, and encourage positives that are moving your civilization toward profit.
Unfortunately, we often focus on problems and forget the positives. If you don’t recognize, reinforce, and improve upon your civilization positives, their continuance falls to chance. Conversely, we must also recognize problems and eliminated problems.
Because people are the engine of your company, the logical place to become aware of problems is by listening to your staff. Unfortunately, many leaders fail to clearly assess potential here for two reasons: desensitization and isolationism.
Many leaders are so far removed from the front line that they develop a leadership scotoma— or blindspot. Unfortunatley, our own success creates a false reality. We fail to see problems occuring in the lowest level of our organization because we not longer feel the pain of those in the trenches. Sadly, the consequences of these problems play out in the small communications between our front-line employee and our customer. All invisible to our view.
Protective isolationism is another problem a leader has with his civilization when the employee wants to hide problems. The employee may feel it is personally his job to correct the problem; he may not want to disappoint the boss with bad news; or he may not be doing his job and doesn’t want the boss to find out.
People who work in a civilization where leaders are desensitized and isolated fall into survival mode. This creates a culture where people become political rather than productive, causing them to give in to the lowest level of their character.
The larger your civilization, the harder it is to avoid becoming desensitized and isolated. This is where leadership at every level of your organization is so valuable. You must have leaders throughout your company, even at the lowest levels of production. Find people who can accurately disagree. Find people you can trust to give you honest opinions— especially on technology. They may not always be right but you get a better picture of your entire work civilization.
In the following weeks we'll look at the five major components to every work civilization. To Be Continued...