Penguins Don’t eat Cheese
While I try my best to stay cheerful, there are certain word combinations such as ‘team building’ that make me irritable. It’s not the ideas that trouble me; it’s the theory that this sort ‘knowledge’, you might say ‘emotional intelligence’, is somehow intellectually attainable or transferable.
Some years back one of our newly hired directors arrived fresh from the West Coast with multiple copies of a management tract that he highly favored. Among other uplifting maxims was the suggestion, "Remember, it took teamwork to build the pyramids!" Our executive director was impressed and purchased several copies which he distributed freely. Needless to say both directors were quite puzzled when certain employees voiced the opinion that both pyramid building and cotton harvesting were offensive models for management strategies. During this same period the entire organization was involved in a Quality Improvement initiative which required a full week of ‘training exercises’ for all staff members. On at least three separate occasions we heard managers or directors say, "I have a totally open door policy, but my staff never seems to make use of it." The implication being that this demonstrated a problem with the staff and not with the management style that surrounded the ‘open door’.
Changes in management style or employee culture are affective changes. Making such changes requires something akin to therapy. I’ve been on the receiving end of ‘counseling’ and a couple of times it worked; I actually changed my attitudes and occasionally my behavior. Doing so required a great deal of work on my part. It helped to have the support and resistance of a trained professional; I should say the ‘right’ trained professional, because on those occasions when the chemistry wasn’t right between me and the person I was working with nothing much happened. The key however was that I went into the process wanting to change. In twelve-step terms I had kind of bottomed out, accepted the need and responsibility for change. And there’s the rub; a manager/director needs confidence. They need to believe they know what they’re doing and that assumption is pretty much antithetical to anything other than intellectual change. It’s not that reading Stephen Covey can’t change the way you do things, but there’s a real likelihood that the changes won’t address the root cause of whatever it is that you think is the problem.
