We know two things for certain: Incivility is expensive, and few organizations recognize or take action to curtail it.”9
“It’s the same old story.”Employees are becoming employer deaf. Grandiose pronouncements for new initiatives by managers today, intended to provoke a new battle cry, are falling on deaf ears. That’s because employees have heard it all before. Bringing your employees together to build new initiatives for a goal or challenge is usually received with rolling eyes and sighs of annoyance and anguish.
Employees are smarter today. They can tell when leaders are inauthentic in their pronouncements. They will usually give you one chance to get it right. No one wants to feel manipulated into thinking that what you’re putting forth is brand new. It rarely is. There are too many options available (even in a sluggish economy) for good people to stick with leaders who aren’t serious about being authentic.
“Because he’s (or she’s) the boss. That’s why.”A patriarchal and paternalistic culture exists in far too many companies. Established by leaders, this societal construct is, surprisingly, kept in place by none other than the employees. Patriarchy and paternalism are symbiotic in that they require both the leader and the led to cooperate. Although both ideas are expressed with masculine words, the concepts don’t apply solely to males. They apply to female privilege as well. There are plenty of matriarchs leading companies today, but whether the leaders are patriarchs or matriarchs, a patriarchal and paternalistic business culture entails employee subordination: There are the haves, and they have all the answers; and there are the have-nots, who have no power.
Most people grow up in a solid paternalistic model of family governance, so it feels very natural to have a “decider” and a “decidee.” One person has the job of saying what everyone else will do, and the rest are paid to do what they’re told. But that’s just a modern version of forced submission.
Employees buy into a patriarchal and paternalistic business culture because it lets them off the hook. They can avoid having to make promises and take action. Instead, they can wait until someone tells them what to do. That creates a dependency on receiving orders from leadership, and those employees can’t execute your strategy because they won’t take responsibility for causing things to happen.
“We’ve always done it this way.”Old paradigms, nonexistent “visions,” and limiting business models that are fixed on past performance keep your employees from moving your business forward. A rigid belief system that creates inflexible boundaries around what is possible for the future makes employees feel stifled. When employees can’t see how or where they can improve their position in life and can’t perceive a future for themselves that doesn’t look and feel a lot like the past, they become apathetic.
Employees who haven’t been shown that they can grow, develop, and expand their opportunities within the organization—so that they have a sense of control over their own possible future—will lose interest in what you want.
“The boss is watching, so just don’t screw up.”Leaders who focus on “not losing,” rather than on working to build something they can share with their employees, end up sabotaging their own organization. For an employee, there’s no benefit to coming to work each day for a leader whose fears dominate the working environment. Those employees just put in their time.
Leaders who are in constant fear of the unknown and uncontrollable events in their business need to get a grip. There’s no faster way to turn good employees into cynical and nonproductive ones than to stress them out for no purpose other than to feel like you’re controlling the possibility of failure.
“So what do we do anything. Something. So long as we just don’t sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we’ve satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late”
— Lee Iacocca
The “Virus” That Destroys Anthills
Dan Dennett is an Oxford-educated American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist, currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In 2002 he gave a fascinating TED (Technology, Education, and Design) talk called “Dangerous Memes.”10 It’s definitely worth your time.
In his talk, Dennett explains the unique and bizarre behavior of what he calls zombie ants. He describes a natural phenomenon in which a parasite infects ants in the Amazon rain forest and turns them into automatons, or “zombies.” The parasite takes over all the functions of their bodies and brains, and the zombie ants have no further control over what happens to them. Their unusual behavior, if left unchecked, could result in the destruction of the entire ant colony.
The parasite—a fungus, actually—deposits its DNA into the ant host, pretty much like a human virus does in humans. The DNA, a form of information, then recodes the host’s brain to behave in uncharacteristic ways that perpetuate the life cycle of the parasite. The parasite doesn’t care about its impact on its host. It cares only that its own life cycle be perpetuated.
But We’re Not Ants (Right?)
So how does this apply to your business? Dennett commented that people’s thinking is infected by ideas and notions in much the same way that the brain of the ant is infected by the parasitic fungus. “Many people have laid down their lives for their ideas or ideology,” he said. “These ideas are infectious. There are a lot of ideas to die for. Most people have been infected by parasitic ideas.”
He then went on: “It’s ideas, not a fungus, that hijack our brains. Most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking. It’s ‘infectious repetitis.’ Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own minds … It’s part of how we seek our highest good … The biological effect of ideas [and ideals] causes us as humans to subordinate our natural genetic interest to other foreign interests or ideas. No other species does anything like this.”11
In a nutshell, ideas can replicate through no effort on our part as they pass from brain to brain. How does this happen? Is it possible that toxic ideas could wipe out entire organizations just as a parasite can wipe out an entire ant colony?
Consider for a moment that an ant colony is like a massive business with an amazing level of intelligence when gauged on a human scale. In many ways, the colony is like your business, but with two major differences:
“Ant strategies” get executed 100 percent of the time, on time, every time. Ants always do what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it, contributing to the smooth operation and survival of their organization and their species. Ants operate on instinct, but that isn’t the same as operating unconsciously. And that is because of the second major difference between an ant colony and your business.
Ants are consciously aware of what is threatening their survival; you’re not. When ants run into trouble, Mother Nature (think chairman of the board) provides them with an awareness of the source of the threat, as well as a masterful way of responding to it. Specifically, as the parasite takes over an ant’s brain, the ant begins to behave irrationally. Once the other ants become aware of the aberrant actions, they isolate the infected ant, take it far away from the colony, and dispose of it.
Unlike ants, most human business leaders have absolutely no conscious awareness of what’s preventing the successful execution of their strategy. They can’t identify what is undermining and sabotaging their ability to get employees to align, to do what they need to do when they need to do it, and to achieve the mission of their organization. That lack of awareness of what’s in the way is the biggest difference between the lowly ant and you and me.
Becoming Aware of the Execution Virus in Your Organization
In your workplace, as we’ve seen, there are hidden viral conversations that invade the thinking of your employees just as the fungus parasite infects the ant colony. And while the virus in your workplace won’t kill you or your employees, it will have such a dramatic impact on your employees’ behavior that i
t can obliterate your business, just as the ant parasite can wipe out an ant colony.
In Chapter 5, we talked about how memes may change as they encounter other ideas, resulting in new memes that may be more or less successful replicators than their predecessors. This evolution of memes is the key to taking control of your business’s future.
Hidden conversations are a form of replicating memes, spreading throughout your organization by taking over your employees one by one. In a team or any group of people who interact together in a workplace, the wrong memes can become toxic and destructive to employee performance, undermining the execution of your strategy.
It may be difficult to understand how this information gets into our companies while we aren’t looking—or why we remain unaware of such a powerful force. Regardless, memes will not be visible until you (not anybody else) expose them and you (not anybody else) reveal the truth about them and their impact on you and your employees’ vision, awareness, connectedness, and accountability—the critical components of the complex evolving system that is your company.
The Execution Virus Will Never Die, But There Is a Vaccine Against It—the Truth
Memes have a definite beginning, yet they have no end. Once a meme invades, it can never be eliminated. In fact, trying to eradicate memes, focusing on what you don’t want, only fixes them more firmly (if surreptitiously) in your business.
Remember that memes—both positive and negative—can interact with other memes, creating new ones. So what vaccine can you give your organization to help it build a resistance to viral memes? The positive meme that acts as a vaccine against all the negative memes is the truth. Not just any truth, but the truth about your company’s past performance and the exposure of any secrets, past and present. This truth needs to cover your most outrageous stories of success, your fabrications, your transgressions against and conduct toward others, and the business secrets that you think your employees don’t know (although they most likely do).
Your past and the past of all the people you’ve brought into your organization are the source of viral memes. Imagine how much more effective your employees could be if you and they knew how memes work and how they have meticulously undermined all your best intentions to execute strategy.
It’s Time to Get Vaccinated (and Then Get Regular Booster Shots)
Though a negative, limiting meme can never be removed, it can be replaced with a positive meme through the following four-step process:
Tell the truth about your past—good and bad.
Identify the limiting and negative viral conversation—the meme—that represents your employees’ interpretation of all past failures. Ask yourself and your employees, “What do we say about ourselves and our company when we tell the truth about the failures we have experienced?”
Declare a positive future—a newly invented positive meme—to take the place of the negative viral meme. This is the truth of who you are, and it results in a powerful stand for the possibility of your shared future.
Adopt a system to keep the positive meme active and replicating throughout your organization. I use a promise-based execution management and feedback system to do just that, and it eventually replaces the negative, destructive meme in your language and thinking.
Throughout this process, you must remember that old memes never die; they just fade into the background to fight another day. That will happen as soon as you fall back into doing things the old way—through the exercise of power or force, for instance.
Because a meme is a language-based information gene that can replicate itself through thinking, speaking, and imitating behavior, the good news is that the technology for dealing with memes is available to all of us: language. Newly invented, positive counter-memes are the only effective ways of dealing with preexisting, destructive memes. Only through language can you declare and align as a group on a powerful counter-meme.
Unfortunately counter-memes have little or no staying power on their own. They are especially weak at first and need a new, conscious structure to support them and maintain their existence. If negative memes—and the automatic thinking patterns they engender among your team—have their roots in past failures, positive counter-memes are based on declared possibilities created through your words.
And here’s the kicker: The memes your employees have? They probably caught them from you. As the leader, you are the most likely source of your organization’s destructive thinking.
But you’re undoubtedly not the only one. Plenty of carriers are capable of bringing subsequent memes into “the colony” and replicating them. In fact, every employee is infected, so every employee can be a host and a replicator, too. You need to vaccinate all of them, but you need to start with yourself. Only then can you begin building the structure to support the new meme that will immunize your organization. That structure takes the form of dialogue.
Dialogue Is the Antibody to the Execution Virus
Memes are one-sided conversations that people in your organization are having with themselves. Effectively, viral monologues like “It’s their strategy,” “They don’t appreciate us,” “They’re always making excuses,” or “they don’t care” are conversations in which nobody’s answering. The employees having these monologues are just repeating and replicating the meme that’s been transmitted to them.
What negative monologues have you engaged in recently?
Are you committed to vaccinating yourself against the Execution Virus?
Dialogue acts as an antibody to negative viral memes. Authentic dialogue is truthful and transparent, so there is no opportunity for a hidden meme to take hold.
Begin by taking a hard look at yourself as a leader, which will help you rise to the challenge of transforming your company. How do you start? You need to ask yourself some very tough questions, and then you need to tackle another virus in your company. It’s called the Entitlement Virus, and exposing and replacing that one is the first step toward exposing and replacing the Execution Virus. Once you’ve done both, you’ll be well on your way to transforming your company and producing the breakthrough results you want.
Real Leaders Are Responsible
Companies that reach for and attain true breakthrough performance are guided by leaders who understand what the company requires of them on a daily basis. It might sound trite to say that leadership is not a privilege but a responsibility; however, I truly believe that responsibility is the mainstay of authentic and effective leaders.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, here are ten characteristics of responsible leaders:
They acknowledge and fully appreciate the law of cause and effect. They believe nothing happens by chance.
They are 100 percent responsible for whatever happens, no matter what.
They do not hide behind reasons why results are not what they said they would be.
They transform the major issues in their lives by first transforming their relationship to circumstances. No matter how bad they think they have it, they don’t try to avoid being responsible for their circumstances, since doing that would leave them powerless over what is happening in their lives.
They rarely utter the word “because.” That’s a word ineffective people hide behind, in an attempt to avoid responsibility. Put it in any sentence and you will see what I’m talking about: Everything after “because” is just cover.
They uncover the limiting paradigms they are allowing into their organizations and transform them into a stand for what’s possible. In this way, they live responsibly with freedom and power.
They affirm their ultimate power to say how it’s going be and then they make sure it is that way, acknowledging at the same time that ultimate power is the same as ultimate responsibility.
They hold themselves and others accountable by making sure everyone in the organization relates to each other according to their professional roles, or “accountabilities.” Relating to others as their personal selves—treating someone as a friend,
for example—undermines their capacity to be accountable and produce results.
They are aware of the conversations they engage in and are 100 percent responsible for them. They do not allow gossip or complaining to undermine integrity and create cynicism and apathy.
They take complete responsibility for the conversations that take place in their companies. (This is the most important one!)
Leaders are responsible for everything in their lives. It’s a 100 percent proposition. It’s all or nothing, and that’s a tough place to stand. But there is no alternative if you want to be a genuinely powerful leader.
The Company Is Not About You, So Listen Up!
You cannot build an unstoppable company if the company is about you. You must remove yourself from the equation and take fundamental responsibility for the questions that get asked, because it’s in the asking of questions that insight, innovation, and discovery happens.
It’s a huge mistake to believe that your company will grow if you don’t allow people around you to contribute to the overall direction of and growth within the company—even if you think you have all the answers. And you don’t.
Your job is to build leaders, to be someone who lifts others up and gives them the responsibility to make mistakes and grow.
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