Back to the Paradigm

We know that in organizations, in the short run, respect for people whose opinions differ from ours and shared interests are the exception rather than the rule. So we know there will be plenty of conflict. This presents two great challenges for organizations: They must train their employees to respect diverse opinions; and they must promote an expectation of “win-win” in the long run, despite the obvious shortterm conflicts of interest.

Thus, our paradigm of good management must include these twin goals as missions of management. But no manager can singlehandedly create mutual trust and respect; trust and respect grow – or fail to grow – in the context of an organization’s climate. It should be an all encompassing value of the organization: How they treat each other, their customers, their suppliers, their investors, their community etc.

There are four factors, or categories of factors, that determine whether a culture of mutual trust and respect can thrive in a given organization. I will summarize them here and examine each separately and in-depth in the next few chapters.

1. People

This factor is the easiest to “sell” because it is the flavor of the decade. Most books and speaker preach the importance of people, of human resources, of human capital.

I agree and share that people are an asset, an extremely important asset.

Think about it: If someone gave you the choice, to loose all your people and have to start again, or loose all you machinery and structures and start all over again, what would you choose? The answer is obvious: It is easier to replace machinery and physical structures than people who know what they are doing, especially if they know how to do it well together.

This explains why the German nation could flourish after World War II. They lost their machinery and buildings but they have not lost the German people and their German culture and dedication to quality. This explains why Israel flourished and became the third internet empire in the world: It had a huge inflow of Russian Jewish engineers.

What kind of people do we want? People who command and grant mutual trust and respect. And what should we do with a person who works for us, but one that does not grant nor command trust and respect? The usual answer I get is: “Fire him!” I disagree. I say: ”Recommend that person to your competition. Why should you be the only one to suffer? As the competition gets entangled in internal intrigues and fights that this kind of person will start, as they turn their energies inwards, you can take their market away.”

What should you do with a person who is extremely knowledgeable, take an indispensable engineer, but one who trusts no one and shows no respect for anyone. He demands it but does not grant it. (There are many geniuses like this.) You should treat them like monkeys: You keep them in their cages, and whenever you need information you give them a banana and extract the information. But you don’t let them out in the corridors, and you never promote them to a managerial position. They are not managers; they never can and never should be managers. They are only there to provide the professional know-how that you need in order to manage.

Producing a culture of mutual trust and respect takes more than having people we trust and respect, we learn from. It is like cooking a gourmet dish; it takes more than just outstanding ingredients. You can destroy a dish in spite of having excellent ingredients, if you do not know how to cook it together; if you do not have a recipe, a process of how decisions should be made together, not in spite of being different, but because we want people to be different.

That is where process as the second necessary factor for building MT&R comes in.

2. Process

An aspect of “process” is effective communication. To manage well, you must be able to understand what people are telling you (as well as what they might not be saying); and you must also be understood. In other words, good managers have to speak and comprehend all the (PAEI) languages. As we have already discussed it, different styles use the same words but they mean different things like the word “yes” and “no.”

Until this crucial piece of the paradigm is in place, there is no guarantee that a team’s decisions will be implemented at all, much less implemented as they were intended to be.

In Chapter 10, I suggest a number of strategies for communicating with each of the (PAEI) styles one on one, while Chapter 11 addresses the problem of communicating with groups: Is it possible to modify your language in such a way that you can be understood by all four styles simultaneously? Volume 3 in this series goes deeper on how to conduct dialogues with people whose style is different than yours.

Is having excellent ingredients and a recipe good enough for preparing a gourmet dish? No. We need appropriate hardware and that is an appropriate organizational structure.

3. Structure

Good fences make for good neighbors.

—Robert Frost A

An organization’s structure determines how it distributes and measures responsibility, authority, and rewards. To achieve good decisionmaking the organizational structure of responsibilities has to recognize that short-term tasks have to be separated form long-term task or the long-term tasks will never be sufficiently addressed. And that is necessary for the organization to be effective in the short and the long-run. Thus marketing and sales should report to two different vice presidents. (More about it latter in the book) We need to start with – or evolve into – an organizational structure that allows people to be accountable for the short and the long run, to have the necessary authority, discretionary authority to get results, and to be rewarded to act in their best interest, the interests of their team or unit as well as in the interests of the larger enterprise.

If its structure enables people to align their own interests with those of the larger group, an organization will foster a climate in which mutual trust and respect can grow. In contrast, a structure that does not make a priority of creating mutual trust and respect will eventually become dysfunctional; its managers, with competing interests and no sense of a win-win context in the long run, will continually sabotage each other and interfere with any effort to treat the dysfunction. (See Chapter 8 for a thorough discussion.)

How does the organization match its employees’ styles and skills with the tasks they are best capable of achieving?

4. Shared vision and values

This is a large component of the role of (I)ntegration, and fundamental to any organization that wants to promote mutual trust and respect. As we discussed earlier, without (I)ntegration, an organization can never become greater than the sum of its parts. Lacking a universal sense of shared values and a common goal, the organization will always be in danger of falling apart if its Founder dies or leaves.

Leadership plays a crucial role in this new construct. Whereas a good manager can excel at any of the four basic (PAEI) tasks, a leader must be an outstanding (I)ntegrator in addition to his other skills to create a culture of MT&R by hiring the right people, learning and teaching how to conduct meetings so decisions can be made with MT&R, structure the company’s responsibilities, authority and rewards correctly and develop a common vision and nurture common values. (For a more in-depth definition of leadership, see Chapter 12.)

Slowly but Surely

On the highway of conflict, when you come to the fork in the road where one road leads to destructive conflict and the other to constructive conflict, there is a very small sign that points in the direction of constructive conflict. Inscribed on it are the words “Mutual Trust and Respect” – but the sign is so inconspicuous that only people who slow down at the intersection will be able to read it. Those who speed up will probably end up in destructive conflict.

Why? Because when people experience the pain of conflict, their usual tendency is to speed up. They get hot under the collar; they raise their voices; they start shouting and interrupting each other; they pound the table; they become more entrenched in their own arguments.

The result? Destructive conflict. And – at least when we ourselves are not upset – we can easily see why: The more tense, angry, or strident someone’s behavior, the less he will succeed, because the other party, feeling that he’s being disrespected, will harden his position instead of trying to work out a compromise.

Working with the CEO’s of many companies around the world, I have noticed that the best, most successful managers seem to grow increasingly relaxed as the conflict gets tougher and more difficult. From this observation, I derived my “duck theory” of management: On the surface, a duck looks calm and unperturbed as it floats along in the water; but under the water its feet are working fast – very fast.

In other words, a good manager stays calm in the midst of conflict. He does not lose his head or become emotional. He does not lose his objectivity. He is considerate and respectful of others – even those with whom he strongly disagrees.

In Hebrew there is an expression that sums up what I am trying to say: “Slow down so I can understand you fast.” Take a deep breath and slow down whenever there is a conflict or misunderstanding. In fact, the more pain you feel, the slower you should go. Don’t try to get out of it; try to get more deeply into it, by slowing down. Take a cleansing breath, as it is called in yoga and Lamaze technique: A deep breath in and a slow one out. By taking slow breaths, you create the necessary condition for patience. It is as if you are saying, “I realize this is going to take time, so I’m prepared to be patient.”

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Summing it up

To have a healthy, effective, and efficient company in the short and long run, we need all the (PAEI) roles to be performed. For that, we need a complementary team. But such a team can experience conflict. To make that conflict constructive rather than destructive, managers, leaders of organizations, countries, and families must create an environment of mutual trust and respect. Building such an environment involves four factors: The right people, the right process, the right structure, and shared vision and values. These issues will be addressed in the next few chapters., an expression