Milking the system

As I grow older, I am finding it harder and harder to stomach politicians, government leaders, company leaders, and religious leaders who lie, blatantly, to our faces, as though we are plain stupid. Whether it's the USA or Norway, or any other modern country, it seems to me that greed has become paramount among the upper echelons. Maybe it's always been this way, or maybe I'm just getting more and more fed up with it. Average citizens are paying high taxes in Scandinavia and we're told that it's to fund infrastructure and healthcare, among other things. But if you do a bit of digging, as some of the dedicated journalists do, you find out soon enough that a good percentage of the money that should be used for infrastructure and healthcare, is actually going into the pockets of leaders of state-owned organizations who give themselves and their cronies (whom they hire as high-paid consultants--it's called corruption) extremely high salaries, or expensive trips to other countries (flying business class of course) that they defend as necessary in order to 'learn how' the other countries do things like build bicycle paths or fund schools. Or they sponsor Christmas parties where the wine and liquor flow freely--all at taxpayers' expense. It infuriates me, especially since most average citizens are living on a budget. I can tell you that we are not flying to other countries several times per month, nor are we sponsoring and defending high-end Christmas parties. In other words, most average people (non-leaders) are not milking the system the way our leaders are.

Where do they learn to do this? Is there no accountability anymore, no sense of justice, no conscience, no ethics, no morals? How can leaders justify giving themselves huge raises, while denying underpaid workers a small one? How do green-party politicians justify their hypocrisy--telling us that we should be ashamed of getting on an airplane to travel, while they hop around the globe by plane many times during the year, or telling us that they need to travel around in limousines because their lives may be in danger, while the rest of us are paying through the nose for car tolls (everywhere you turn now here in Oslo) in order to get us to stop driving cars, or paying high prices for collective transportation (you'd think the politicians would be intelligent enough to lower prices for collective transport in order to encourage its use here in Norway, but no). Do they think we're stupid? Because here's a news flash for them--the protests are only just starting. Here in Oslo, a new political party has reared its head; it's called Nei til bompenger (No to Tolls). And I'm voting for them come autumn, because I'm sick and tired of the other political parties that just continue to lie to us. The same with the healthcare system here; is it free? No. It is cheaper than in the USA, and if you need an operation you won't pay an arm and a leg for it like in the USA. But the taxes we pay are what fund the healthcare system. I don't have a problem with this; what I have a problem with is the exorbitant salaries that hospital and healthcare leaders enjoy, also that the bureaucracy of healthcare has grown exponentially. We are paying for administrators to bureaucratize us to death, and the only way to do something about it is to protest and to vote the politicians who support this system out of office.

Greed. It blinds political leaders and company leaders. It encourages them to milk the system. Power blinds them too. God forbid they should have to give it up at some point (think Trump). And that brings me to our illustrious religious leaders who are also blinded by worldly power, the ones who allowed pedophiles to carry on freely in their midst, while the rest of us were trying to live our lives according to the teachings of Christ. Think the Catholic church, that deserves everything it is experiencing now (it should pay out settlements to individuals abused by pedophiles for a long time to come) and more, for sweeping its pedophile problem (a crime) under the rug for decades. How do these religious leaders live with themselves? But they did and they do, because they knew they would not get caught forty or fifty years ago. Their parishioners were loyal, hard-working, law-abiding, and God-fearing. They lived according to their faith and were not the hypocrites that their priests turned out to be. Any priest that defends or protects a pedophile, a wife-abuser, a rapist, or a murderer, is a criminal in my book. They can rot in jail for all I care. They abused their calling, and their parishioners, and God. Perhaps God will show them mercy, I am not interested in doing so.

An excellent article about identifying the next generation of leaders for your company

Leadership is a topic that I've written a lot about during the past decade, in this blog but also in several books that I've published. I've written a lot about the poor leadership I've seen and experienced personally, but also about the good (and even great) leaders for whom I've had the privilege of working. What characterizes the latter is their generosity, expansiveness, visionary abilities, and their emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence involves knowing your employees' strengths and weaknesses and acting on that knowledge when trying to find the right person for the job. In order to know this as a leader, you have to be able to talk to your employees.

It's a pleasure to come across an article that makes a lot of excellent points about how to identify leadership potential. More specifically, this article focuses on identifying the next generation of leaders in your company:
https://www.clicktime.com/blog/identify-your-companys-next-generation-of-leaders/

It also makes the point that extroverts don't necessarily make the best leaders. I couldn't agree more. So many 'introverts' have been ignored or passed over when it came time for promotions to leadership positions. During the past decade, the focus on extroversion has been intense. I have no idea why. I've participated in countless numbers of meetings, many of them dominated by extroverts. There was little exchange of ideas; the outcome was often that the introverts declined to participate in future meetings or found ways to get out of them if they could. Not a win-win situation for a company.

Modern workplaces during the past fifteen years or so have often been dominated by extroverts, by Newspeak, by trendy business philosophies, and by a dilution of responsibility that serves no one. Let's hope that the next generation of leaders gets back to business and to an understanding that "your company is only as good as the employees who work for you, and your employees are only as good as the leaders who lead them".

How to achieve better employee engagement

An article worth reading.......https://www.clicktime.com/blog/5-steps-towards-better-employee-engagement/

Employee engagement is a tricky subject. I agree with the points brought up in the article, but emphasize that good managers and leaders are what lead to engaged employees. Employee satisfaction starts at the top and works its way down. Leaders and managers are employees too, and if they are engaged, motivated and happy, if they believe in what they do and in the goals of the company, those who work for them will be motivated as well. In some few cases, I've experienced the opposite--that engaged and motivated employees re-inspired their bosses who had lost their motivation. If that happens at times, that's good too. But leaders must understand their role in keeping employees motivated. They have a responsibility to do so. That is what leadership is about.

What’s wrong with this picture? v3

I promise this will be the last post with this title. But the past week or so has been nothing but scenarios of this type at work—inefficiency, stupidity, misinformation, poor communication, laziness and just plain indifference. I'm so tired of it all, of having to deal with customer service reps at scientific supply companies who don’t want to deal with customers, of talking to salespeople who haven’t the faintest notion of when their products will be delivered but who lie anyway and give you a delivery date so that you spend several hours running around trying to find out to whom it was delivered. I’m tired of leadership that doesn’t have the faintest idea what employees want or if they do know, how to give it to them. I’m tired of hearing ‘we’re going to be the best in the world’ when the IT infrastructure is crumbling around us. You don’t get to the top with an IT infrastructure that is from the Stone Age. I’m tired of hearing the same conversations about the same problems that we’ve been talking about for years. There were no solutions to them four years ago and there are no solutions to them now. There are no solutions because there is no money, or if there is money, it has been misappropriated and used on things that were not necessary. We need an IT budget to revamp the IT infrastructure. We need to be discussing the future of IT in our department, how to arrange it, how to pay for it, etc. We don’t need to be discussing Christmas parties, overnight seminars or other social events for which we have no budget.

I’m tired of so many thing in the workplace. I cannot wait to retire, so that I can do other things that get me outdoors, away from the four walls of a sterile office, away from the claustrophobic interiors and indoor climates of modern buildings where you can hardly open a window. I want to breathe fresh air, be surrounded by trees, plants, greenery. I want to let go of all that is unhealthy—the stress of useless discussions and problems that will never be solved. I want to be free of arrogant leaders, leaders whose egos are like black holes that destroy everyone in their vicinity. I’m tired of leaders who permit convicted criminals to remain in their jobs. I want to be free of the rhetoric, the bullshit, and the lies when it comes to ‘being great’. I’ll settle for being good enough. I don’t want any more competition for funding, for promotions, or for publishing. I don’t care about impact factors, H-factors, titles, prestige or anything related to inflated egos. I am so tired of academia and academics. I never thought I’d say it, but it’s the truth. I can’t wait to retire to my garden. That’s where you’ll find me.  

Questions I have for those who appoint leaders

• Why is it that so many current leaders seem to have risen to the level of their incompetence?
• Why are cowardice, silence in the face of tangible problems, and lack of honesty rewarded with appointments to key leadership positions?
• Why are employees who tell the truth, give feedback, and inform about potential problems often pushed to the side, ignored or frozen out of the leadership pack?
• Why is it necessary to resort to embarrassing lazy incompetent leaders in front of others in order to get them to do their jobs and to take responsibility?
• Why is it necessary in 2017 to have to explain to leadership that infrastructure is important? That without a well-functioning IT infrastructure, you may as well work at home where the IT infrastructure is optimal (of course it is—you cannot keep up in society without updating your computers, software, phones, TVs). That without an annual stipend from one’s workplace to purchase consumables, little will get done because there is no money to buy necessary items.
• Why is it necessary in 2017 to have to explain to research leadership that technical positions (research assistants) are alpha and omega in terms of getting things done in the lab? Why isn’t this a given, that a research group has automatic access to a full-time permanently-employed technician? Does leadership really think that senior research personnel are going to do all the lab work themselves, do all the procedures required for research projects, summarize all the data, perform statistical analyses, write articles, write grants, review others’ articles for journals (for free), review grants for national and international funding agencies (often for free or for a nominal payment), attend a plethora of (mostly pointless) meetings, act as mentors for PhD and Masters students, teach junior personnel, hold lectures, travel to conferences, etc.? Excuse me for saying so, but if they think this, they are just plain stupid. I have a colleague (over fifty years old) who told me that some of her worst work weeks have involved attending eighteen hours’ worth of meetings (that works out to almost 2.5 days a week devoted to meetings). It stands to reason that she will not have any time whatsoever to do routine work or lab work. 
• Why is it considered ok for leadership to not inform employees about important matters, but not ok if employees ignore the regulations stating that they must file periodic progress reports and account for every penny they spend?
• How did it get to the point where a research career can end literally overnight when funding dries up, and more to the point, who thinks this is a good system or a good approach? Many of those careers belong to highly-competent and efficient scientists who just don’t happen to be doing trendy research. 
• How can one honestly encourage young people to stay in academic research when the prospect of them attaining a permanent research job/steady funding/tenure is slim to none? Is it ok to essentially lie to them, to tell them that it will work out for them (it won’t in most cases)? 
• And finally: why do we older scientists even entertain the possibility that we have a snowball's chance in hell of getting research funding? Of writing a fundable grant? If I have learned anything these past five years, it’s that even though I managed to write good grant applications that got me external funding to work as a post-doc and junior scientist during a ten-year period from 1999-2008, that’s not good enough anymore. And it will never be good enough. The past does not count. Realism is what counts. Luckily I have a permanent staff scientist position so I cannot be fired because I am older, but there is no funding for consumables. It's a strange situation to be in. But I now focus on other things that give me satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. None of them have to do with my career. 

Be the Best in Business: What Are the Barriers to Becoming an Effective Leader...

An excellent post from the blog Be the Best in Business--about the barriers to becoming an effective leader; one of those rare posts where what you read is truly educational and inspirational.

Be the Best in Business: What Are the Barriers to Becoming an Effective Lea...: In 2011 Anne Morris, Robin Ely, and Frances Frei highlighted five barriers to becoming a truly effective leader. Read more about them here.    

Figuring out the Norwegian workplace

The job section of this past Sunday’s Aftenposten had an interesting article about Norwegian workplace culture entitled ‘How does the Norwegian boss think’? Foreigners who work in Norway often find themselves at a loss when it comes to figuring out how their bosses think and how to interpret what they say to you—what do they really mean by their comments and remarks, and have you understood the context of what was said? The importance of understanding your workplace and the signals given you by your bosses and colleagues cannot be overemphasized, especially where career advancement and salary are concerned. The article interviewed three Norwegian company directors/leaders who are Norwegian and who had worked internationally; they were asked to comment on what makes Norwegian workplaces different from workplaces in the rest of the world, since Norway’s workplace culture is quite unique (of course, why is this not surprising to me). Here are their thoughts:

• Leader #1 meant that Norwegian workplaces are ‘process-oriented’, not ‘solution-oriented’, and that a problem or an issue could be discussed ad nauseum before a decision is made
• Leader #2 had a similar opinion to leader #1, stating that many foreigners are simply not used to having the entire organization get involved before a decision can be made about a particular issue
• Leader #3 meant that Norwegian workplaces are relatively ‘flat structures’ where each individual employee has a high degree of authority to make his or her own decisions without having to consult a boss

Whenever I read such articles, they trigger some interesting feelings and thoughts, so that I ‘feel a blog post coming on’. I can relate to the first two leader comments; specific issues are discussed over and over in multiple meetings over many months, perhaps years, before decisions are reached. Frustrating? Yes. My question is why this has to be the norm. However, and this is the crux of the matter, someone ultimately has to make the final decision. Whether it is a committee at the top of an organization, or one person, someone has to take the ultimate responsibility. An organization of several hundred individuals is not responsible for a final decision; some of them may come with input and advice toward a decision, but the responsibility lies ultimately with company leaders. Who makes the ultimate decision can often be a mystery, and whether or not employees are informed about a final decision rests with those who are responsible for communicating it. Information flow downwards can be a true exercise in frustration. There is no transparency at the top of huge public sector workplaces, in any case. And I disagree entirely with the third leader; it has not been my experience in my public sector workplace that each individual employee has a say concerning a decision to be made that will affect them. Simply not true. The third leader has simply not visited my workplace recently; the six or more levels of (administrative) leadership between the individual employee and the top echelons ensure that you as an individual employee have little to no authority to make decisions that affect your daily work life. You can individually be the most ‘solution-oriented’ employee in the world; it won’t matter. You are forced to deal with the top-heavy administrative levels above you. Take ordering a lab reagent or small piece of equipment, for example; before a necessary item can be ordered, at least six to eight people need to be involved in the process of ordering—the person who needs the product and who informs the relevant department person who then registers the order and passes it along in the system to the person (or persons) who actually order the product on the computer. But we’re not done yet. They may order or they may pass the order along to yet another office that will do the ordering. It all depends, on what I’m not sure. Project funds have to be checked to make sure there is enough money to order the product; that can involve the accounting department. And if the item is actually ordered, it is shipped to a central receiving department that then delivers the item to the person who registered the order, not to the person who needed the item. This means that the secretarial consultants who register the orders receive on average ten packages a day. They must check their files to find out who needed the product ordered and then chase down the relevant person who requested the item. The actual invoice goes to an unknown place; no one is really sure where it ends up or how it gets paid. If this was truly my call (if I had any real authority), I'd call, fax, or email the company myself with my order, cutting out the multiple middlemen, and have the item delivered directly to me. The current ordering process reminds me of the excellent film Brazil, about the tentacles of bureaucracy and how when they find you, they can destroy your life and peace of mind. My question is—why do we need all these people involved? This was not my decision, to make it so complicated. And perhaps more importantly—is there any one person who understands the system well enough to explain it to others? No one seems to have thought of that. 

My conclusion is that these three leaders espouse a politically-correct rhetoric. It makes employees feel good to read that they have some autonomy and can influence the decision process; in truth they have little autonomy and little influence, at least in the public sector. We may have had more of both back in the 1990s, but no more. 

According to the article, a number of companies have started to offer courses about understanding Norwegian workplace culture, to employees who come from other countries/cultures with a different way of doing things. Such courses, along with formal career guidance, were non-existent when I arrived in Norway. I don’t know if they would have helped or not, since I work in the public, not the private sector, and most of these newspaper job articles seem to deal with the private sector. But one thing is certain; communication with bosses in the public or private sector can be muddled, messages from them unclear, ditto for job tasks and definitions. How can you know for sure if your recent efforts on a particular project are praiseworthy or not? Are you being considered for advancement in your organization? Should you actively seek out career advancement, mentors and advocates? Will you be considered too aggressive if you do, or will it be considered appropriately professional to do so? No one really tells you what to do or how to behave, at least not directly to your face. You have to figure out most of these kinds of things on your own, because communication is often very indirect, and suggestions to employees as to how to go about doing things may be presented in a rather offhand informal manner. This is the art of thinking like a Norwegian in your workplace—figuring it all out for yourself, except that if you are Norwegian, you have understood this from the get-go. As a foreigner, you will miss the signals that tell you that what you’ve just been told is important, you will make a fair amount of mistakes before you understand how to respond or react, how to deal with your bosses, and how to understand their dealings and communication with you, and you will waste a fair amount of time trying to understand a system that cannot be understood (my impression). In that sense, I miss the directness and assertiveness of American workplaces; communication between boss and employee is often much clearer and easier to understand, perhaps more formal and professional, yes, but I prefer that to ambiguity and vague promises and suggestions.  

Where does the buck stop?

I don’t know that I was ever very good at working in a team setting where all members of the team had equal input and worked together on one project or sub-project. I did not enjoy this when I was younger, and I don’t really enjoy it now. I am not comfortable with ‘shared leadership’ or having to report to multiple ‘leaders’. I come from a generation that feels more comfortable with one leader who plans and delegates individual projects/sub-projects to the different group members, each of whom will then be responsible for his or her specific task. But it is the group leader who has the ultimate responsibility for the outcome of a project or new venture, because it is that person who planned it and delegated it. In other words, it is important to me that each person in a group understands his or her function and role in the group, and can proceed accordingly with the tasks in front of them. I think that each member of a group should have responsibility for a project or a sub-project, and that the success of that project or sub-project is dependent primarily on individual input, not on teamwork. Your contribution to the team is your piece of work. A bit daunting perhaps, but the feelings of responsibility and happiness from a successful project outcome are worth their weight in gold. You progress intellectually from such experiences, and that in my opinion should be a goal in the workplace. I have been a group member who was given responsibility for specific projects, and I have been a group leader who has done the same with the people who worked for me. From the feedback I received from them at that time, I know that each person was satisfied with his or her individual projects. There was no overlap between projects, so there was no danger of one person feeling as if his or her project was merely a regurgitation of someone else’s project, or worse still, ‘busy work’ that was of little to no interest to anyone. That is the worst feeling of all—that what you are asked to do is just busy work and not really important overall. If someone hit a roadblock, I discussed the problems in detail with the person involved, not with all members of the group. I did not feel that it was up to the other members of the group to solve whatever problems arose for one of the group members; that was my job as leader. I still feel that way. Group members may talk among themselves, suggest different ways of tackling a situation or problem, but in the end, the decision about what to do was mine to make after discussing the problem or setback with the person involved. This is my approach and I am relatively unapologetic about it.

I chose to write about this today because I saw a poster ad for a new TV show the other day that essentially says the following: ‘when you are faced with one of life’s most important decisions, thirty heads are better than one’. There is a picture of a young woman standing in front of a group of about thirty individuals, to emphasize the fact that no important decisions should be made alone or in a vacuum. This does not resonate with me at all; I think it’s quite ok to ask others for advice, but asking thirty people for such advice seems a bit much to me. To then require that they help me make a crucial decision that affects my life seems untenable; it would never cross my mind to behave like this. An important decision that affects my life is mine to make, and mine alone. Of course this means that I alone bear the responsibility for a bad decision, but that’s the way life works. One head or thirty heads cannot ensure the perfect outcome to a decision, because we don’t live in a perfect world. There is no such thing as a perfect decision or a perfect outcome. You take a risk each time you make a decision; you also take a risk in the sense of knowing that you must live with the ramifications of your decision. It is possible to learn from mistakes or bad decisions, although as I get older, I don’t look at my bad decisions as mistakes; they were simply bad decisions that in many cases were rectifiable. You are allowed in this life to make another decision to counteract a bad one. Nothing is set in stone. We are flexible individuals who change and grow with the years. If we stay fluid, we don’t trap ourselves in outmoded ways of thinking and behaving.

I guess what bothers me about this particular ad is the emphasis on group thinking. It makes me nervous, because it seems to me that we are giving away our personal responsibility for our decisions to others; we are in essence diluting out our personal responsibility. We can always blame ‘the group’ if things go wrong. In this way, we don’t have to feel bad about the outcome of ‘our’ decision. But is this a good thing in the long run? If we extend this type of thinking to the workplace, what are the long-term effects? Who has the ultimate responsibility? Should there be one person who sits with that responsibility? President Harry Truman had a plaque on his desk that said ‘the buck stops here’. I have more respect for that type of thinking than for a plaque that would say ‘the buck stops here, but also in the next office, and in the office down the hall, and in the office after that’.

There are ‘too many chiefs and not enough Indians’ in modern workplaces. That may reflect to a large degree the complexity involved in running modern workplaces in today’s world, most of which are too large. But it’s gotten confusing—confusing to try to figure out who you should talk to when there is a question or a problem. If I want to or attempt to solve a problem myself, I am discouraged from doing so. We are informed that there are others we should talk to—this or that office or department that deals with this or that. So yes, I attempt to contact them, in accordance with company policies. I speak to one person, who then refers me further on in the ‘chain of command’. It’s often difficult to get an answer or a solution to a problem, such that the problem or question is then put on my ‘to do’ list (which is essentially my ‘must wait indefinitely’ list). In this way, problems ‘go away’; there are no problems when you cannot get the answers. It’s a type of contradictory logic that leads to an obstructional workplace. I’m sure there are many such workplaces these days, characterized by multiple levels of leadership, ‘team leadership’, group thinking, dilution of responsibility, confusion as to who’s in charge, too much bureaucracy, and systemic obstruction. Ultimately, these organizations will come to a standstill after a while in terms of innovation and efficiency. If the problems arise from the fact that most companies are too large, then I am all in favor of returning to smaller and better-run companies, where it is clear to all who work there who the leader is and where the buck stops. And I am all in favor of working at a job that is clearly-defined and not to be shared with others; not diluted out to the point that there is little point left in doing that job. ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’, as the old saying goes. It’s true.

It takes two to tango

Sat down to breakfast this morning, and was flipping through the newspaper sections rather randomly. My husband was reading the front section of Aftenposten, so I settled on the Jobs section, where there are not only employment ads, but often articles about new trends in the workplace as well as advice from headhunters and work-life coaches. Wouldn’t you know, there was a photo of two couples dancing the tango in connection with a leadership course they’re taking. This particular course encourages its participants (leader personnel from the company Siemens Healthcare) to learn to dance the tango as part of learning how to team-build and be a better leader. In this particular case, since there were no women attending the course (which is telling in and of itself—not many female leaders out there, apparently), males were dancing with other males, and the photographer snapped a photo of two of these couples. There was talk about ‘stepping outside of your comfort zone’ and all that. I’m sure it’s a lot of fun and hard work to learn the tango, and I would be stepping out of my comfort zone as well to learn the tango and any kind of ballroom dancing. But I would do this in my free time, not during work time, so it wouldn’t matter that I was a slow learner. I’m not sure how learning the tango has anything to do with learning how to be a better leader. Does it have to do with learning to lead and have others follow, or vice versa? What happens if you are trying to follow the lead of someone who never learns the dance, as is often the case in the workplace? What happens if none of the trendy leadership courses results in better leadership? I don’t get it, so someone has to please explain to me why companies are spending money on such courses at a time when the global economy is in a downturn. These courses cost money, a lot of money.

I have yet to see the solid research/statistics that demonstrate the absolute benefit of leadership courses for leaders. How do you measure the effectiveness of these courses; how can you assess the results? Can you be sure that the methods work? I’m a scientist, so I want to see the research data. Please show me the reports so I can read them. I have no problems with an annual daylong seminar where leaders can meet together in their workplace and share common problems, brainstorm, or otherwise come up with new and creative ideas about how to lead. I just don’t understand the emphasis these days (the new trend) on traveling to out-of-the-way hotels and resorts for this purpose, for two or more days at a time. The idea I presume is that you cannot just ‘go home’ at the end of the course day; you’re stuck together with other leaders during the evenings where social skills play a large role as well. Networking and more networking. I know several leaders who shun these trips (or want to) as often as they can. A decade ago, private companies spent money on sending their employees out into the forests and mountains to learn how to work together as a team to survive and maneuver through the inevitable problems that cropped up. These team building courses seem to have paved the way for the new types of leadership and team-building courses. Is this because the old ones didn’t work, or are the new approaches the ideas that sprang up during the old team building and leadership courses? Did someone ten years ago think—it would be cool to have leaders learn to dance the tango together? Is that how it works at the top?

As children, we learned the Golden Rule—‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. In other words, treat people as you would like to be treated. I learned this rule early on and it stuck. And when I have broken it, my conscience tells me that I have wronged someone and to go and make amends. I live this way in my personal life and I have behaved accordingly in my work life. I can honestly say that I have tried to the best of my ability to treat those who have worked for me with respect and honesty, and have been as professional as possible when dealing with them. The awareness of your behavior and how it affects others in the workplace are the two most important things one must learn as a manager, and if you manage this you can be an effective manager or leader. I don’t think it is more complicated than that. Unfortunately, when you are lied to, exploited or pushed aside by company leaders, it makes it that much more difficult to treat leadership with respect. It takes two to tango. You cannot expect respect from employees if you do not treat them with respect. It’s that simple, and that complicated. We say that about children and adults as well; you cannot expect children to respect adults who abuse them or treat them badly or indifferently. It doesn’t matter if the adults are parents, teachers or other authority figures. I could already differentiate very clearly when I was in grammar school, who were the good teachers and who were the abusers. You remember both and you learn from both. Had I been surrounded only by abusive teachers, I would have learned how to evade them to the best of my ability--how to lie to them and how to be dishonest—how to play the game to see who would eventually win control. They would not have deserved better treatment. The same is true for abusive or exploitive company leadership.

My view of workplace leadership is more along the lines of the top-down approach. If you want respect from employees, start at the top and look down. Take a really good look at yourself, and then your employees. Companies should hire leaders who know what the Golden Rule is, who have ethics and morals, who abhor corruption and political game-playing, and who are not just interested in their cushy titles and salaries. They should hire leaders who understand that the buck stops with them. But companies have to value these types of leaders. This is the type of leadership that employees will respect. This is the type of leadership that employees will listen to, when new ideas, change, and challenges confront them in a world of global uncertainty and instability. Employees will look to leadership for guidance, but they will also pitch in and do their fair share and more if they know it will help the company survive. I have yet to meet one employee who was treated fairly by his or her company, who didn’t want to give back his or her fair share to that company. In other words, those employees who have been kicked around, exploited, lied to or treated poorly, and there are a number of them, are those who do not want to give back their fair share to their companies anymore. They have felt the injustice that pervades the system; they know that they are dancing alone. Where they once followed another’s lead, they now dance in place. Their leaders bailed out on them a long time ago. I would say that’s the biggest problem in workplaces these days; employees have to figure out everything on their own. There is no one to look up to, no one to mentor them, no one to take responsibility for them and their professional wellbeing. There are few good leaders who take their employees into consideration, who prioritize them. I know of one leader who was told that she was too concerned about her employees; that as a leader, she should be concerned with the company views and policies and with getting her employees to ‘accept’ a new policy that amounted to nothing more than a new way to exploit their competence and dedication (getting them to work twice as hard for the same amount of money). Suffice it to say that this company has a lot of problems and that the turnover rate for employees is high. Employees can ‘see through’ a lot of the new trends in the workplace, and leadership courses are one of those trends. Bad leaders will not become good leaders by learning to dance the tango; they will become good leaders by practicing the Golden Rule. I have yet to see a course that focuses on the ethics of leadership. I have to wonder if it would be well-attended.

How NOT to win friends and influence people

My apologies to Dale Carnegie who wrote the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, a motivational book that was published in 1936 and which is still immensely popular all these years later. I simply had to comment on some of the leader behaviors that I have been witness to this past month in my workplace, which never cease to amaze me (or others I discuss them with). I’m not the target of these particular behaviors; other colleagues are the unlucky ones for the time being.

How would you like to be at this kind of meeting, one that I recently attended as an observer, where a manager spent most of the time negatively comparing his employees to a new stellar employee? And when these employees attempted to object, as some of them did, they were told that they are mediocre (in Norwegian—‘middelmådige) workers at best, and that mostly what they do is sit on their butts and keep their jobs warm (in Norwegian—‘å ruge på sin stilling’, much like a bird would do sitting on its nest to keep the eggs warm). It’s an interesting development, and it amazes me yet again that leaders in any workplace, in 2012, have not yet understood that insults, sarcasm and passive-aggression don’t win them friends, nor do they motivate the employees who are the targets of this behavior. The targets seem to have decided to mount a counter-offense, which has led to conflict between them and the leader(s) in question. And who knows where it will all end? I am a spectator at present and will likely remain so, unless I get forcibly dragged into the fray. Perhaps all of this is a test to separate the wheat from the chaff, or to get the perceived 'lazy' employees to quit. A management strategy to get rid of dead weight. Who can really know?

I find this type of behavior so unprofessional and childish. I will allow for the following: that leaders can think what they want to think about their employees, for example, that they are lazy and unproductive, but that they should NEVER voice such opinions publicly in a meeting format, in front of these employees’ colleagues, as was the case here. I was witness to what occurred, as were several of my colleagues. None of us liked this behavior. We ended up at a loss for words--blindsided--in other words, taken aback by it, so that it is difficult to mount a response. These are the types of discussions that are best conducted behind closed doors, between the employees in question and their bosses. But this doesn’t happen in my workplace. Rather, everyone should know what the leaders think about the employees in question—a modern form for putting folks in the public stocks and letting them stand on display for all to mock. I really do believe that some leaders think this type of behavior will light fires under the butts of the employees they think are lazy and unmotivated. That treating them negatively will create a positive result. I know that it will not. How do I know this? Because I have had the privilege and responsibility of mentoring a good number of PhD and Master’s students during the past ten years, and motivating them to do a good job NEVER involved insulting them or degrading them publicly. I am happy to report that I have not treated any of them badly. Ever. The result being that they voice their satisfaction with my mentoring, guidance, help and advice. I can attest to the fact that being nice and caring about their development and progress yield results. It also creates self-confidence where there might not have been much at the start point. Helping people to believe in themselves—their talents and gifts—is a gift in and of itself, a gift that creates personal and spiritual growth in the persons who practice this. I think this is common sense, but I'm wondering if perhaps some of these leaders need to find Dale Carnegie's book on their desks come Christmas time. 

How some companies go from good to great--a book by Jim Collins

I am reading the bestselling book ’Good To Great’ (published in 2001) by Jim Collins, who is the author of ‘Built To Last’, also a bestseller. I emphasize “bestselling” because they are books about the business world, and it surprises me that there is enough interest in the business world to guarantee a bestselling book. But apparently there is, and given the state of the economy during the past ten years, perhaps interest in these types of books is not that surprising. I for one find such books fascinating; I never get tired of reading about companies, their employees or leadership issues. Both books deal with companies, workplace leadership, greatness and longevity. ‘Good To Great’ discusses why some companies manage to become great companies starting from the level of good companies, but it also discusses mediocre and even bad companies and the likelihood of their achieving a ‘great’ status. I like the book so far because Collins is not just presenting his subjective opinions; he and his research team have done extensive research on what are considered to be great American companies, and have come up with some ideas as to why they became that way. They uncovered the qualities and characteristics of greatness—why some companies manage to become great while others don’t.

Here is his opening paragraph in Chapter 1: “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good—and that is their main problem”. The opening paragraph draws you into the book and makes you want to explore the topic further. His premise is interesting. But what is a great company? How does Collins define ‘great’? His book is not a primer on how to get to greatness. It is more of a scientific treatise that describes the qualities of companies and of CEOs that have achieved greatness and maintained those results for at least fifteen years. And that by itself makes it an exceptionally interesting book, because it is steeped in objective research about the issue.

Here are some of the ideas that Collins brings up and discusses:

·         “In a good-to-great transformation, people are not your most important asset. The right people are”.

·         Who are the right people?  Collins writes: “The good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience. Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but they viewed these traits as more teachable (or at least learnable), whereas they believed dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are more ingrained (sounds like integrity and emotional intelligence are prized highly in both leaders and the right employees)

·         He argues for rigorousness in finding and keeping the right people and in letting go of the wrong people or shifting them to positions where they may be able to blossom.  It’s not about mass layoffs and ruthless treatment of employees. He says: “To let people languish in uncertainty for months or years, stealing precious time in their lives that they could use to move on to something else, when in the end they aren’t going to make it anyway—that would be ruthless. To deal with it right up front and let people get on with their lives—that is rigorous”.  He doesn’t argue against laying off specific people but he also discusses the possibility of shifting them to other positions to give them a chance to develop their true potential. This takes emotional intelligence and common sense on the part of company leaders in order to figure this out.

Collins also discusses ‘Level 5 leadership’, which he describes as a “paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. Level 5 leaders are “ambitious….., but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves”. They are “modest, self-effacing, understated, fanatically-driven, diligent, take responsibility for failures and give others the credit for success”. In my book, this is the definition of people with integrity and emotional intelligence. He is quite clear on one thing—that “every good-to-great company had Level 5 leadership during the pivotal transition years”; this conclusion is unequivocally supported by his team’s research data.

My questions are—why is there so little emotional intelligence in workplace leaders? Ditto for integrity and ethical character? Why aren’t they reading these kinds of books, or if they are, why aren’t they learning from them and putting their newfound knowledge into action? And why aren’t more potential Level 5 leaders being tapped for such positions? Why is it that there is so much mediocrity in workplace leaders at present? Potential Level 5 leaders are stifled into silence, bypassed, ignored, encouraged to leave or simply fired. Strange behavior on the part of companies whose visions are to be ‘the best (company, university, hospital, etc.) within the next few years’. I’m hoping for a renaissance of sorts—a new focus on integrity and emotional intelligence in workplace leaders.

A lesson in employee satisfaction

”People are the most important resource we have at SKAGEN and it is therefore very gratifying that they are also very happy in their jobs. The workplace is demanding, but unique, and expertise and knowledge are important in all aspects of the organization”.

Mette Helgevold Årstad, SKAGEN Human Resources manager

Why you wonder, am I quoting a human resources manager and her views about the company she works for? It is because the company she works for is not just any company, it is a mutual funds company founded in 1993, and it was recently voted one of the top ten places to work in Norway by the Great Place to Work Institute. They surveyed 12,000 employees from 136 companies and SKAGEN FUNDS came in as #9 out of 68 companies with 50-250 employees. Impressive, if you ask me, but I’ve heard this before about the company. And it makes me wonder how they do it. How do they achieve employee satisfaction? Could it be the bonuses that they hand out at Christmas time to all employees, from high-level managers to secretaries? What is their secret? Whatever it is, I want to bottle it and share it with my (public sector) workplace, because at present it’s on the opposite end of the scale in terms of employee satisfaction, unfortunately. And I know a lot of the skeptics will tell me that SKAGEN is a private company and that things are done differently there. So what? Why can’t the public sector adopt other things from the private sector besides the goal of making money? Why can’t they learn from the private sector how to treat employees well?

Many people in this country have bought shares in mutual funds offered by SKAGEN; the company thus has a huge amount of money at its disposal for its national and global investments, and has done very well since its founding in 1993. They not only treat their employees well, they also treat their clients well. We recently attended the play ENRON courtesy of SKAGEN; they had a few hundred tickets that were made available on a first-come/first-served basis to attentive (answering an email ad) clients, and I just happened to be one of the lucky ones who got tickets when I saw the email advertising this. I like this idea of treating clients to a night out. The skeptics and the cynics I know were quick to add that the company can afford it and so on—that it’s just a drop in the financial bucket for them. I know this is true. But I ask--how many other companies are actually doing this for their clients? I appreciate the gesture. It’s not just the rich they’re courting; it’s the common man and woman. And I’m not naive; of course I know that they are looking for new clients. Again I say, so what—it’s their job and they do it well. They also offer seminars and courses, for example, on pensions and pension reform, saving for retirement, and so forth. I recently attended an evening seminar for women only which was very interesting, particularly the lecture about pensions, retirement, and early retirement. The seminar was free and during the break, the company provided tapas, dessert, fruit and wine. So again I say, if this is how they can treat their clients—by sharing a little of the wealth, then it’s not surprising that they also ‘share the wealth’ with their employees. Not too difficult to achieve employee satisfaction that way—by rewarding your employees for their hard work. But not only that, it seems to be an interesting place to work, even though it’s a high-pressure environment. SKAGEN seems to function well as a company and other companies could learn from them how to treat their employees. I’m not just talking about handing out bonuses at Christmas time; I’m talking about creating a work environment that appreciates and cares about its employees, at least from my vantage point. I’m talking about leadership that listens to and ‘sees’ its employees and likes them. There’s a lot right with this picture.

Musings about change and depression

Nearly a year has gone by since I began writing this blog. I began writing it to help me deal with the many changes that were occurring in my workplace, among other things. The changes themselves would have been difficult enough to deal with in my home country (USA), but the fact that they happened here in Norway made them even tougher. That is because it has been nearly impossible to ‘crack the code’ in terms of understanding how my workplace functions, what leaders want (or don’t want), how to get ahead, how to ‘get around’ some of the ancient rules that govern it, and so forth. It has made me feel somewhat better to know that many Norwegians in my workplace haven’t been able to make sense of the changes either. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Because unless you’ve lived in another country for a number of years, you have no idea of what can happen to you and your sense of judgment in a different culture. No matter what happens, you will always question yourself and your sense of judgment first when things don’t go as planned. Did I interpret this wrong, was I to blame, did I misunderstand the other person or the conclusions from a meeting, and so on. I have spent many years trying to fit in ‘career-wise’, trying to understand the Scandinavian corporate/business/academic mentality, doing my best, giving my all, in the quest to do a great job and to succeed as a research scientist. It has not been easy. It would not have been easy anywhere else either, but it was doubly hard here to succeed in any way because of the extra effort that had to go into trying to figure out the system. I have not been fortunate enough to have had mentors or sponsors. My husband has been a wonderful support system but he has also had difficulties of his own trying to figure out his workplace (we now work for the same hospital conglomerate, just in different locations of the city).

During the past year I have written a lot about my work life in an attempt to understand what happened to my workplace and by extension, to me and my colleagues during that time. The past three to four years have been transition years involving a lot of reorganization and restructuring associated with a huge merger of four major city hospitals, and when the dust settled, it was time to start the process over again since the powers that be who organized the first restructuring were not satisfied. And so it goes. I’ve written about colleagues who have had difficulty adjusting to all the changes; I’ve written about my own struggles adjusting to so many changes. Not all the changes have affected us directly, but even if they have not, they affect workplace morale generally, because budgets have been cut, the quality of patient care is always being questioned, research grant support has been reduced, and there is a lot of talk about the good old days when there was more money available and less bureaucracy and administration. But there is no point in talking about the old days. They are gone. There is much more bureaucratic control now, and a hierarchy of leadership that did not exist before. Is it a better system? Only time will tell. If it works out, it will be because employees made a concerted effort to make it work. There is no guarantee that it will work out, however, and that is the big gamble. The politicians who decided on this huge merger can be voted out, and the new ones who come in can in principle decide to reverse some of what has happened if they don’t like what they see. Plus there is always something new on the horizon, some new social trend or policy that can be implemented so that the legacies of different politicians will be ensured. In the meantime, huge social experiments go unremarked. I wonder if there are sociologists studying the effects of huge mergers on employees. I am waiting for the data from those studies. But so far, I haven’t heard of any such studies.  

 

Massive changes can make workers unhappy and even depressed, especially when they do not really understand what is happening around them. To be fair, despite considerable effort to keep employees informed, it is nearly impossible for a workplace to prepare them for all eventualities. But what employees want to know is not how fantastic everything is going to be once the dust settles; they want to know how the changes are going to affect them personally. They need reassurance that their jobs are not in danger. They need to hear that they are more than just chess pawns who can be pushed around on the chess board, plucked up from one area of the board and set down on another. They want to hear that they are doing a good job; they want to know that their projects can proceed as usual; they want some normalcy and stability in a highly unstable situation. There are always employees who thrive on continual change. The majority of employees thrive on stability, and that has to be recognized and accepted by workplace leaders. You cannot demand loyalty and obedience from your employees while telling them that their jobs might be in danger. You cannot tell them to ‘get out’ if they don’t like what is happening around them. This was essentially the message from one of my workplace leaders in a lecture she gave prior to a Christmas party (of all things) several years ago. Some people may have liked her style. I found it unappealing and rather tactless, because she was stating the obvious and didn’t need to. It’s aggressive and unnecessarily so. It’s not how you win friends and influence people. A better approach might have been to have said that there will be changes and that some of them may be difficult, but that we are a team and that if we all pull together, we can get through the changes and perhaps come out stronger. But she is a pawn herself in a long line of pawns that have to spout the company line. I doubt she felt comfortable spouting the rhetoric. If I am representative of the average worker, all I can say at this point in time is that the vagueness and ambiguity that existed prior to the merger have gotten larger, not smaller. It is not possible to get an overview, no matter how hard one tries. I find it difficult in any case. Do I need the overview? I don’t know. I’ve been told that I do, that it’s important to understand the workplace and management structure. Some people I know wonder who their bosses are, because in some cases, people now have three or more bosses—some who have administrative responsibility for employees, some who have the professional responsibility. But when employees ask who their new boss is, they don’t get an answer. So is it any wonder that employees get depressed?

Depression, according to the psychiatrist and author Rollo May, is the “inability to construct a future”. For some reason this definition resonated with me. I responded to it viscerally and intuitively. Why? Because it felt true. When you are depressed, you are stuck. You don’t know which way to turn, because you don’t have a clue about the future. You cannot envision your future nor can you see how to go about building or creating it. In order to create anything, you must be able to visualize it first. With depression you lose the ability to visualize the future. You are stuck in the now. All your creative and mental energy goes into figuring out the ‘now’.  It’s as though a fog settles over your head, blocking your forward view. You are forced to stop driving and to sit on the side of the road. You become passive, waiting for instructions or a road map for how to proceed further. Your energy flow gets blocked. Or you may drive around the same area over and over, stopping at the same stop sign, and not getting any further, because you have lost your sense of direction. Depression may not be a bad thing if you manage to deal with it eventually, if you get frustrated enough with being stuck. It is harmful when you give up and give in and those approaches become a permanent way of dealing with the trials that life deals out.

The Chinese talk about chi (qi), the energy flow in a person, as being an important aspect of a person’s health and life situation. It makes sense to me. If that energy flow is blocked, it will affect the health and energy level of a person. Again, I respond to this intuitively; it just makes sense. The blockage must be dealt with in order for the energy to flow. The goal is harmony for the mind and body. Sometimes it is enough just to read an inspirational text; the blockage may dissipate once the mind understands the situation in a new way. That is the beauty and the power of the written word. In other situations, a good film or conversation may achieve the same thing. The important thing is to free the energy. 

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.  

The Emperor's New Clothes--New Public Management

I attended a breakfast seminar yesterday morning sponsored by Forskerforbundet--my union. Yes, scientists here are unionized (you don’t have to join a union but it is encouraged and smart to do so for a lot of reasons), and Forskerforbundet is definitely one of the largest unions. It is quite an active group and keeps its members well-informed about what is happening on the scientific, political and economic fronts in this country and internationally. The topic of the seminar—‘Have current government politics led to a better everyday life for employees in academia?’--was the reason I decided to attend. The resounding answer for most of the attendees was no. There were four speakers who had brief presentations and then the floor was open for debate. One of the lectures was entitled—‘Accounting as Politics’; it was very enlightening. It was essentially a presentation of New Public Management (NPM), how this management style is defined, and its impact on the public sector when it is implemented. Afterwards it was interesting to hear university and college employees—scientists, teachers and educational administrators—talk about how bad the current situation has become under NPM. NPM in the public sector is the big topic of discussion these days. I found the seminar interesting because the speakers managed to crystallize, explain and confirm the feelings I have had about the changes in my workplace during the past few years. Things just don’t feel right anymore, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what is wrong either. What I do know is that finances and budgets are the only things that interest upper-level management these days; also that scientists are expected to understand complicated accounting practices and are reprimanded if they do not make an effort to understand them. A few years ago I remember telling an accountant in my workplace who called me about some mistake he thought I had made that if he wanted me to spend a lot of time learning his job, then he needed to come into my lab and learn how to do my job while I was busy learning his, because someone had to fill in the gap. There was silence on the other end of the phone and then a click as he hung up on me. I am certain that he made a note somewhere that ‘this woman is difficult’ or something similar. I am difficult—I question authority. I ask-- ‘who made these (new) rules’. We are expected to drop whatever we are doing on a moment’s notice to focus on some monetary or budget issue that is suddenly of prime importance today, but of course we know that tomorrow it will be something else again. It surprises me that no one in upper management has made the connection that the lack of focus on the actual job that a scientist was hired to do (research) due to constant administrative distractions and paper-pushing leads to a fragmented work approach that in turn leads to loss of productivity and reduced efficiency. This never seems to get discussed.

What is NPM, you may ask. A few years ago none of us knew what it was, let alone its impact on our daily work lives. NPM is a management theory that has already seen its day, as far as I can ascertain from the little I have read about it. It is already considered passé in other countries that fell willingly into its snares and then managed to free themselves from it. But Norway appears to have welcomed it with open arms, putting its unique twist on it as only socialist democrats can do. In theory, its tenet is that optimal management of the public budget results in better economic outcomes and increased efficiency (due to competition). It is rather utopian in its quest for perfect efficiency and a perfectly-balanced budget. We all know that in the real world, and especially in the health care system, perfect efficiency and a perfectly-balanced budget are impossible to achieve as long as patients are involved. But this system treats patients as commodities. And it treats the employees in these systems as commodities as well. It’s a cold management style. You are only as valuable to your workplace as your productivity deems you to be. In other words, you are measured by what you produce. The problem with this way of looking at things in the healthcare system and in academia/education is the following—what are doctors and nurses ‘producing’? Hospitals are not factories. Cancer research institutes are not factories. Colleges and universities are not factories. What are academicians, researchers and educators ‘producing’? Looked at in the NPM way, researchers are producing articles about their work. They are being measured by their output. The production of more articles and the production of more PhD and Masters students means more money for the institution one works for and for the individual researcher. The scientists and academicians who survive and who are rewarded in the current environment are those who are well-funded with large research groups. If you are a small research group, the idea of real competition with a large research group is a joke. How can large and small research groups compete on equal playing ground? They are not well-matched from the start point. But this is what we deal with now. We are told that ‘we are good, but not good enough’, and if we only do so-and-so, that we will suddenly get more money and more students. We are encouraged to ‘compete’ and to live up to our ‘potential’ even though most of us realize that the world is such that only a few people ever reach the top or become the best. Those of us who come from non-socialist systems understand this from the start point. But understanding this does not mean that you cannot do good work and find your niche in the system. Accepting that you are not the best in a particular field does not mean that you cannot work in and do good work in that field. But there is little room for that sort of thinking in NPM.

So what is a ‘good employee’ in an NPM system? As far as I can determine, a good employee is obedient, subservient to the goals of a balanced budget and perfect efficiency, and one that does not combat the system in any way. A good employee does not make waves, does not stick his or her head up, and does not state his or her opinion about particular issues. Conflict resolution and negotiation are key words in how to deal with employee problems if you are a leader, and as far as I can see, it mostly means sweeping those problems under the rug and forgetting about them. The rewards for this obedience are many—promotions to higher administrative positions with emphasis on leadership qualities (that promote the further spread of NPM), an automatic network of NPM supporters, and the feeling that you are part of something much bigger than yourself—that you are promoting change and helping your employees ‘reach their potential’ and become more efficient producers. If it wasn’t that this system has been unreservedly and unabashedly adopted as important to the future of public sector workplaces, I would dismiss it as more ‘new age’ thinking like EST and all those self-help philosophies that made their founders unbelievably wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, I can accept that some of those philosophies have helped some people. But by and large, I tend to be suspicious of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ way of thinking. I don’t hop on the bandwagon just because a million other people are doing so. I like to think for myself and to be able to observe and judge for myself whether something works or not. I am inherently suspicious of anything that promotes utopian thinking. We are imperfect humans. We are not machines or robots. We will never ever manage to achieve perfect efficiency and perfect productivity on this earth. If NPM supporters start by accepting that tenet, we can work from there. It would mean that they would have to reverse their current approaches. That would be best. And then you’ll possibly have me on your side. 

In defense of good leaders

I have been interested in the topic of good leadership for some time, and will be writing more about it in the months to come. I want to write about it because I think it is something that is sorely lacking in most workplaces these days. And the few good leaders who are left are having a tough time of it. It is interesting that there appears to be no correlation between good leadership and the number of management courses one can take to help one become a good leader, but nevertheless, these types of courses are increasing in frequency and workplaces are becoming more insistent that their leaders take these courses. I am open to the idea that people can become good leaders, but I think it has more to do with the type of workplace environment one finds oneself in as a leader plus the type of values a potential leader has. Is the potential leader an ethical person who believes in fairness and in rewarding hard work? Or is the potential leader only interested in promoting himself or herself at the expense of his or her employees, and what type of behavior does the workplace support and reward? These are all relevant questions for discussion. The conclusion may be that good leaders are born that way, not made, but I don’t necessarily believe this either. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but that fact does not diminish my interest in the subject.

I bring up the subject of good leadership because I have been witness to, and experienced myself, poor leadership or lack of leadership in the workplace. I have also experienced good leadership and the differences are viscerally clear to me. I have written a book about passive-aggressive leadership in the workplace and how demoralizing that can be for employees http://www.amazon.com/Blindsided-Recognizing-Dealing-Passive-Aggressive-Leadership-Workplace/dp/1442159200. My feeling is that many workplaces these days promote and support passive-aggressive leadership--that it is a management strategy for systemic procrastination and effective employee control because most of this kind of behavior is always right on the edge of what can be considered ethical, correct or true. In other words, management cannot be taken for this type of behavior toward employees and they get away with quite a lot in this way. Employees suffer, but leaders who are trying to be good effective and empathic leaders also suffer because the system does not support their efficiency, honesty or empathy. Leaders who do not side with the passive-aggressive approach will find themselves at the mercy of bureaucrats and administrators higher up in the system that will make their work lives miserable for not conforming to the current system.

There are many ways to bring down (or at least attempt do so) good leaders in a passive-aggressive work environment. In my book about passive-aggressive workplace leaders, I did not discuss this particular aspect in any detail, but rather focused on the effects this type of environment has on its employees. But much of what I brought up in that book in terms of how to keep ordinary employees (not in management positions) down can also be applied to keeping good leaders down. If passive-aggressive management identifies one or two good leaders (by my definition—ethical, honest, empathetic—and not very adept at playing political games) as ‘problem-people’ in the system, it won’t be too long before those people are ‘silenced’ in some way because they represent a threat. They may find themselves ‘frozen out’ of the popular clique, may be demoted, may be ignored or overlooked for new projects or promotions, or may be the recipients of a new type of behavior that I find quite disturbing. This type of behavior utilizes the employees who work for good leaders who for many reasons may be dissatisfied with that person’s structured approach or expectations or demands on them. If these employees feel stressed or put-upon, or if they feel that the demands of the job are too great or overwhelming, they can now accuse their leader(s) of harassment, which puts the burden of proof not on the employee making the accusation but immediately on the leader (and eventually the workplace) to refute the accusation. The accusation of harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature. In fact, in the instances I have been witness to, with one exception, the accusations have had to do with that the leader(s) were perceived as too tough, too demanding or too strict. In other words, the leaders could say no to these women if it was deemed necessary and this didn’t sit well with them. Why would employees do this to their boss, one might ask? I asked the same question. I have now seen this happen several times in the past few years, and I asked the same question each time. Young women have been the instigators in all of these situations—they have charged middle-aged male leaders with harassment because they have not been able to measure up to the demands of the jobs they were asked to do by these men. Or they were denied something they wanted and instead of waiting to see if the answer could in fact be yes the next time they asked, they took matters into their own hands. Who informed these women that this was a potential strategy for dealing with their situation? The only answer I could come up with was that the bureaucrats and administrators higher-up in the system who did not like these leaders suggested this to these women as a way of causing trouble for those leaders. And these women followed that advice. The result? Management informed these leaders that so-and-so had filed harassment charges against them, resulting in the women being moved into another department or group, which is what they wanted in the first place. The accused leader had no choice but to accept this outcome, and if he or she wished to ‘fight’ to refute the accusation, was informed that one was of course free to do so. But it is common knowledge that this involves using a lot of time to ‘clear’ one’s name and possibly getting a hold of a lawyer or a union representative or both to take the case or look at the situation, which could cause the workplace some grief. If the accused leaders do not have the support of their own leaders, then the likelihood of clearing their good names is very slight. For all intents and purposes this means that these leaders will have unfounded ‘harassment’ charges against them that will remain on their records indefinitely. As long as these leaders do not fight back or raise a ruckus, the passive-aggressive strategy of systemic procrastination levels the conflict to a status quo situation—the women get what they want, which was to get out from under that particular leader and to prevent that leader from having any contact with them whatsoever, and passive-aggressive management gets what it wants—the silencing of what they consider to be a problematic leader. This is what has happened in all the instances I have been witness to. The accused leader is caught between a rock and a hard place; fight the accusing employee or fight management. It is mostly a lose-lose situation. Over time, rumors travel and reputations can be destroyed. It is horrendous that such things can happen in 2010 without repercussions for either the accuser or for management that support them blindly. Things just continue as before at the workplace. But what about those who are unjustly accused? What happens to them? Why is this fair? What about the families of the accused? Have these women doing the accusing taken into account the stress that such situations cause the families of these men? Do these women ever realize that their false accusations cause problems for women who really have been harassed? I doubt it, and this makes them disloyal employees in my book, because if they can do it to one leader they can do it again to another, and in this way they always get what they want in an already tainted workplace. I have to wonder how they live with themselves. It might be worthwhile for the accused leaders to pursue the situations to their ends, because if no one ever does then injustice will always win out.

Comments about the 'Evolution of Science*

I read a very interesting short article the other day, published in a magazine called The Scientist. The article is entitled ‘Evolution of Science’ and was written by Lauren Urban. You can read it here http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57368/. Urban writes about a scientist named Alex Shneider who has attempted to describe the different types of research scientists by putting them into stages: stage 1, 2, 3, and 4, in essence, categorizing them, which is a scientific approach in and of itself. Shneider describes the characteristics and talents of scientists in these different stages, and makes the point that there can be an evolution, so to speak, from one stage to the other. It really is the first article of its kind that I have read, and it resonated with me. Shneider describes first-stage scientists as the great innovators and risk-takers. Of course, Craig Venter, whose company Celera Genomics competed with the publicly-funded Human Genome Project to sequence the human genome, comes to mind. He lives in another world than ‘us ordinary folks’, and listening to him talk about his ideas for the future and for the planet (via his new company--Synthetic Genomics which he co-founded) is awe-inspiring and exciting. It must also be said that he has the capital and the chutzpah to take the necessary risks to move science forward, and if he doesn’t have the money he isn’t afraid to ask private investors for it. I remember seeing photos of the sequencing labs at Celera, and they showed rooms full of DNA sequencers that operated around the clock. First-stagers move the world forward, but they are not necessarily the ones who translate their ideas into practice. This is where the stage two scientists come into the picture. Shneider describes them as having “ingenuity, inventiveness, and high risk tolerance”. Most scientists fall into the third-stage category, which Shneider describes as those scientists who “use those new tools to answer new questions, thereby coming up with new insights and more questions”. They are, in his words “more methodical, detail-oriented, and concerned with absolute correctness”. Fourth-stage scientists are those who write about and chronicle science in an attempt to organize scientific data, but they are not the discoverers and inventers.

It struck me while reading the article that I have had the privilege of working in two dynamic research laboratories during the past twenty years, both of them American. One was located in New York City and the other in San Francisco, California. If I could sum up my experiences in both laboratories, I would have to say that the laboratory leaders were a mixture of stage one and stage two scientists in their respective fields, and they managed to impart their ideas and enthusiasm to the third-stage scientists who worked for them. More importantly, these leaders functioned as a tight-knit team. They knew how to communicate and collaborate with each other and they respected each other’s ideas. If you have experienced the opposite--leaders who fight and compete among themselves and do not know how to collaborate--you will appreciate how necessary leader teamwork is to create a dynamic work environment where people feel like they are a part of something important, where they feel valued, and where they want to come to work. It is perhaps the best argument against having business administrators take over all aspects of research science. They have null understanding for the necessity of this type of dynamic work environment. They are only concerned with the fiscal bottom-line, which ultimately leads to workplace boredom and lethargy.

The laboratory in San Francisco was run by a man who was rumored to be a difficult personality when he was younger. I’m guessing that these rumors were spread by small-minded people who did not have his vision or his energy. In any case, he paid little attention to them and reached the top without them. He is still an innovator. He collaborated well with other innovators, both American and European, and his lab was truly an international lab, as was the New York lab I worked in. At the time I worked in New York, we had scientists from Poland, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Germany working there as well. It felt like we were part of the ‘larger picture’, that what we did had meaning outside of our lab, and that we were contributing to making the world a better place. I believe these are necessary feelings if one is to do a good job.

Shneider states that all four stages of scientific discipline are valuable and that what characterizes each stage is a particular type of talent. The challenge therefore for each scientist becomes identifying your particular talent and finding your niche. The original article by Shneider upon which Urban based her article is worth reading. It is entitled ‘Four stages of a scientific discipline; four types of scientist’ and was published in the journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences, volume 34, issue 5, in 2009. It is probably best to contact the author directly by email in order to obtain a reprint: ashneider@curelab.com.

Bye Bye Work Ethic

I’m always trying to make sense of my incredibly passive-aggressive workplace, a national hospital (which is a recent huge conglomerate of four Oslo hospitals) that has continually stated for the past several years that it wants to be the primo research hospital, but somehow never quite manages to get to that exalted position because it can never settle on one good philosophy for getting there. Trying to decipher the philosophies behind the decisions made over the past few years has preoccupied me for quite some time. The current philosophy is that in addition to being scientists, we should be accountants, bookkeepers, secretaries, technicians, group leaders, lecturers, teachers, inventors, patent holders and administrative geniuses. This should all be accomplished during the work day which consists of reading and answering a lot of useless emails describing the latest change or new regulation. Ok, before I hear the collective moan from my American friends who tell me how awful the job situation is in America right now, and I know it is, let me just say that the USA may be going through an economic crisis, but the ‘land of the oil money’ is also going through some kind of economic crisis as well. They are also going through a true existential crisis. I really don’t think the politicians know what they want anymore. And it really is no better here in social-democratic Norway than in the good ol’ USA, despite the NY Times articles that are always presenting Norway as such a wonderful country—the land of milk and honey. The milk and honey wells are drying up. There is major downsizing afoot here in the public sector, New Public Management (NPM) is taking over (even though there is ample data showing that this business philosophy does not work), and the emphasis is on efficiency, productivity and on marketing your work and yourself as a product. It’s all about the patents, baby—the more the better. It’s about competition and flying high over the radar. NPM is supposed to increase efficiency but as far as I can see the only thing that has increased is the number of bureaucrats needed to direct the few remaining workers who truly want to work, who still have their work ethic.

A good example of the new complexity associated with NPM is the division of leadership into administrative and professional leadership. A worker now reports to an administrative leader and a professional leader (in essence your real boss because this is the person who has the professional competence to function as a mentor for you). If one is lucky there are just two leaders to report to these days. Some workers now have four administrative bosses (who again all report up-over in the system to each other) whereas one year ago it was sufficient with one leader who tackled the administrative and professional tasks. The logistical problems associated with this are huge and the practical consequences are just confusing. Here’s a good example—a researcher talks to one administrative leader about his or her future and is advised to proceed in one way, however the other administrative leaders each have their takes on the situation and have not talked to the others, so the result is a huge mess. You can get told that you should not seek a research group leader position by one leader, whereas the other one comes into your office asking you if you want to be a group leader. And yet another one is advising you to build up your group this month but half a year ago the same person was telling you to wait a few years to do so and to rather focus on collaboration and teamwork with your current group leader. Is this crazy-making behavior? Yes, it is. Are these leaders aware of their inconsistent behaviors? I don’t think that they are. That’s the tragedy.

Thus, the goals are always moving targets. A few years ago, it was easier to take aim and to hit the target than it is now. My question now is more along the lines of—what are the goals really? At least a few years ago it seemed as though the goals were still to work hard and to produce good research work. Now I don’t know anymore.

I think reality TV thinking has invaded the mindsets of the public sector. Everyone is expected to be a star and to perform on cue. The problem of course is that this way of thinking IS the problem. There can only be a few stars, and the rest of us simply have to make do with the meager talents we have. Unfortunately, the biggest proponents of NPM are researchers who were never very good at research but who got promoted to cushy administrative positions, learning economy and management along the way in their endless leadership courses, and directing the productive researchers on how research should be done, all the while cutting the number of research positions available. The problem is one of envy if you ask me—the non-productive researchers who are now the administrators are envious of the researchers who actually DO the job they were hired to do—research, guiding students, writing articles, and publishing. I have a small problem believing that you can be a research hospital without doing research. What’s next—research outsourcing? That’s going to cost the country a pretty penny.

Jimmy Carter once used the word malaise to describe the feeling in America at the time he was president, if I remember correctly. That is what is happening to many researchers I know here—they are experiencing a malaise that is leading to a lethargy that will eventually be impossible to reverse. The desire to work hard and to do your best is disintegrating at a rapid rate. I understand why.