Managing People

Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

August 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Take any corporate scandal or the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and you’ll find lower-ranking voices that tried to be heard within these organizations to prevent or minimize the consequences of the excesses or the accidents.

Some leaders are too isolated from reality and establish an “all’s-good” guise whereby anything other than affirmative becomes an undesirable—unwelcome even—answer to a performance-related question. Such leaders foster a “good-news culture,” where any truth-teller or devil’s advocate is quickly dismissed. Queries such as the cursory “Is everything okay?” elicit information-free, non-answers like “yes” and “great!”

When leaders are disconnected from reality, they become incontestably right. Employees know the rule of the game is to say what’s safe to say. To not tell the truth. To tell the leader just what she wants to hear. Employees would instead go with the flow rather than speak truth to power.

Consequently, business pressures often lead to shortcuts that go overlooked. Risk is normalized. Leaders who cannot tap into the truth get blindsided when the problems blow up because they didn’t nip the problems in the bud. Leaders have only themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Idea for Impact: Insightful leadership isn’t about the privilege of position but the privilege of information flowing upwards. Wise leaders dare to seek information they don’t want to hear. They know how to ask the right questions, look for revealing details, and set up a culture of openness that makes it easy for employees to tell the truth.

Tips for Working for a Type-A Boss

August 4, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Type-A bosses tend to accomplish great things, at least short-term. But their high intensity and impatience could make them hard to work for.

If you’re more of a laid-back employee, realize that most of the time, Type-A’s intensity isn’t about you. It’s the way she relates to the world around her. Type-A is what Type-A does.

Here’s how to deal with the overly amped-up style of the Type-A boss:

Speak up. Do your homework and anticipate needs/wants. Be proactive and take the initiative on everything. Bring solutions, not problems. If you disagree with something, communicate directly.
If nothing you do seems perfect enough for your boss, don’t assume the worst and put your guard up. Be more receptive to evaluation. If you’re constantly being challenged to add “one more thing,” seek specific feedback on how she’d like you to refine your work.
Set boundaries on what she can expect from you. Ask for clear performance goals. With Type-As, it’s always about them; you can’t hold yourself accountable for their personality. When it gets tough, try not to take it personally. Ask for what you need, but choose your battles wisely.

Idea for Impact: One of the best ways to handle a Type-A person is to try to be Type-A yourself. You don’t have to morph into an ego-driven jerk, but try to be more organized and keep on top of everything.

Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’

July 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From The Telegraph over the weekend: a Leeds-based “woke dance school,” the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, “drops ballet from auditions as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist'” as it “reviews ballet art form as part of a diversity drive.”

Many other performance arts are rooted in other cultural traditions, so should we expect that white folk refrains from performing those because that would be cultural appropriation? Shun yoga, not wear cornrow, and drop taco nights?

Should everyone else avoid trains, cars, computers, and much else because they’re white European originations?

Should people not be allowed to wear clothing, cultivate hobbies, or pursue careers that aren’t reflective of the culture they were raised in?

Look, works of art incorporating racist clichés and caricatural images (such as in The Nutcracker) should be reassessed with a different consciousness. Appropriation is elastic and ill-defined. Not all cultural appropriation is harmful or exploitative, certainly not innocuous cultural appreciation—where elements of other cultures could be used to pay reverence and highlight the historic oppressions of those cultures. Appropriation is but offensive when what’s being appropriated brings problems to the people to who the cultural artifact belongs.

On embargoing ballet, let’s stop denunciations of white pride where it doesn’t exist before. Let’s not fuel resentment with our shrill accusations and ill-thought overreactions and contribute to the rise of white supremacy.

Idea for Impact: Raise cultural hackles only for a good cause, i.e., when there’s real offense intended. Don’t stigmatize valuable cultural interchange. Delimiting features of cultures is contradictory to our goal of creating a diverse, melting-pot society. E pluribus unum.

Is The Customer Always Right?

July 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No matter how finicky or rude a customer is, many businesses make employees treat bad customers with unquestioned respect or risk reprobation—even getting sacked.

Per the well-worn business adage, is “the customer is always right?” No, they’re not. Sometimes they’re wrong, and they need to be told so.

Your goal should be to do business with people that you enjoy doing business with. Some customers simply aren’t good customers. They don’t follow directions and complain irrationally. They have unreasonable expectations, and they treat your people rudely.

Idea for Impact: A prudent maxim is, “the customer is usually right.” Put the customer first, but don’t get mistreated by them. Putting the customer first doesn’t mean putting employees second. As a business, you must let customers be wrong with respect and dignity; but employees should be authorized to caution some customers, “After due consideration, we believe your actions are unacceptable. Persist, and we’d choose to lose your business.” Some bad customers are just bad for your business.

Almost always, though, unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning; they can especially offer an honest assessment of the expectations you’re setting. Customer satisfaction with a transaction depends on their expectations going into it.

The #1 Learning from Sun Tzu’s Art of War: Avoid Battle

July 11, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Art of War, Chinese strategist-philosopher Sun Tzu’s treatise on military strategy, is studied not so much for the advice it gives but for the state of mind it encourages. Developed in only six thousand Chinese characters and 25 pages of text, this way of thinking has held vast sway in such fields as military planning, strategic management, and negotiating. “Every battle is won or lost before it is fought.”

Something exceptional about the Art of War is the extent to which it’s devoted to methodically avoiding battle altogether. War isn’t something to be entered rashly or for petty reasons. “A sovereign should not start a war out of anger, nor should a general give battle out of rage. While anger can revert to happiness and rage to delight, a nation that has been destroyed cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life.”

Nor is war’s dominant purpose to cause physical destruction to an enemy. Instead, the pinnacle of military skill is to conquer one’s opponent strategically—by penetrating his alliances, rattling his plans, and coercing him diplomatically—without ever resorting to armed combat. “Why destroy,” Sun Tzu poses, “when you can win by stealth and cunning? To subdue the enemy’s forces without fighting is the summit of skill.”

Sun Tzu’s insistence that an enlightened strategist can attain victory without fighting echoes the foundational Taoist doctrine of “non-action (Wu-Wei.”) Armed conflict, therefore, is the last resort. War in itself represents a significant defeat. As a matter of course, Sun Tzu allocates a good chunk of the Art of War to the line of combat and attack. A savvy general must, however, take every accessible measure to gain victory swiftly, with minimal casualties and suffering for both sides. “The best approach is to attack the other side’s strategy; next best is to attack his alliances; next best is to attack his soldiers; the worst is to attack cities.”

Again and again, through implication, Sun-Tzu’s war document posits peace and restraint—the avoidance of battle—as the utmost victory. To fight at all, Sun-Tzu insists, is already a substantial loss, much worse than losing in war.

Idea for Impact: The Art of War is a worthy course on conflict management because avoiding confrontation requires more remarkable skill than winning on the battlefield.

Why Groups Cheat: Complicity and Collusion

July 2, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

News broke out that Ernst & Young revealed this week that its employees cheated on ethics exams. The accounting behemoth is being fined $100 million. That’s one of the biggest fines ever levied against an audit firm.

It’s absurd that specialists responsible for keeping things straight and steering moral enterprise cheated on ethics exams! Ernst & Young’s leadership evidently disregarded the internal reports about the cheating. Perhaps because when people identify so strongly with a group, they’re much more swayed to view the group’s actions positively and accept that group’s norms.

Research by Vanderbilt University’s Jessica Kennedy and colleagues suggests that high-flying people are sometimes more inclined than low-ranking people to adopt what their group recommends, even when it represents an ethics breach. Power sometimes provokes people to so strongly want to identify with their group that they’re willing to overlook when the group’s collective actions cross an ethical line. This affinity is, therefore, urged to sustain transgression instead of stopping its spread, especially when the odds of being caught and punished are slim.

Stop Trying to Fix Things, Just Listen!

July 1, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In these distraction-packed times, it’s harder than ever to create the mental and physical space necessary to really listen—actively listen—to another person.

A common listening pitfall is trying to have all the answers. Instead of fully hearing out a friend, you’re scrolling through your brain, being all frustrated that this problem has an obvious solution and concocting a hasty fix.

As a listener, your most important job is to listen with curiosity and immerse yourself in the person’s message. Just try to understand the person and listen to their feelings. Validate their suffering, take their perspective, and let them know you understand. That’s often what people want most.

Idea for Impact: To be a better listener, talk with each other about the ways they’d like you to give support. People have different ways in which they prefer to seek and provide support.

When Your Team is Shorthanded

June 30, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When your team is understaffed and/or overwhelmed, remind your supervisors about the pressures you’re dealing with. Ask for more resources without being perceived as a whiny opportunist.

Prioritize and focus. Decide what goals are truly significant—to you, your team, your company, and your customers. Comb out anything that doesn’t have a justifiable economic impact or isn’t aligned with the company strategy. Meet with your boss and team to ensure everyone’s aligned with your tailored priorities.
Align expectations and manage up. Engage your team on what you could collectively do differently to provide better results with greater efficiency. Have daily and weekly priorities. Use short, frequent meetings to increase your team’s work momentum. Let small successes be a motivational tool.
Get credit for your good work. Make the most of the understaffing by recasting yourself as an asset to your company amidst this apparent upheaval. With the buoyant jobs market and a heavier workload for those left behind, you may never be in a better-negotiating position.

Idea for Impact: If your team is understaffed and overworked, you don’t need to suck it up and try to do it all. Don’t keep your head down, and don’t let the burden of responsibilities stymie your personal and team goals.

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