Why even bother? A couple of weeks ago we accompanied a neighbor and friend on his last journey. Heavy smoker, not shy to pour himself another glass of wine or jenever, the Dutch gin, gone within a week after it was revealed he had lung cancer. But from casual comments when we spoke about the news, or things within the apartment building we live in which had to be fixed, I gathered that he knew he was looking at the end run from close up. Yet he devoured all the main newspapers every single day, read one book after the other, stayed on as the chairman and ‘busy bee’ of the collective of owners, until the light went out. Since he had been an international banker, we had plenty to discuss over the years, and we sure had our differences of opinion, as you can imagine, given my somewhat unorthodox opinion in our part of the world. But for me it was never personal.
In order to solve a conflict, you need to focus on possible ways out. Not necessarily a solution, but a ‘mode’ which allows the parties involved to do their own thing. You can’t see eye to eye, but you respect the contract. In my professional career safety came first, but I was not a fireman, a soldier or a policeman, and I needed to make money for the company too. Conflicts are a threat to safety, particularly if they become personal, when the parties concerned allow themselves to be carried away, hating each other with a vengeance. War breaks out, and all concerns over safety, or preservation of wealth, go out the window. Though a well established, steep hierarchy may go a long way to prevent serious accidents, working as a team is nearly always the better option. Unless one of the members of the team has a score to settle with one or more of the other members, rendering the effort impossible. Or, on the other end of the equation, when a team loses sight of the task at hand, focussing on fueling the ‘team spirit’ by avoiding all criticism of other members, or the strategy and tactics to defeat the competition, in order to preserve the ‘peace’.
There is no firm, proven concept that is guaranteed to deliver results under all circumstances. The individual responsible for delivering results may be a well respected, knowledgeable coach, brought in to deliver the vaunted trophy, and fail miserably. Or he, or she, is not much of a coach really, but the talented team doesn’t need a real coach. He or she will be honored and congratulated as the team wins the trophy, and all the team members will praise him or her for creating the right atmosphere around the team, but truth be told, he or she was merely a host, or hostess. This person may be successful again, if he or she may select the team members, looking for certain qualities which relieve the coach of doing much of anything, save from making sure he or she is not getting in the way. Now, in my line of work, you didn’t get to pick your own team, and team members rotated in and out as required by the task at hand. Moreover, as a coach you were assigned to a different teams on a regular basis, and it was not a given that there would be familiar faces in your team. To be successful as a coach under such circumstances requires considerable flexibility, apart from a firm and well established routine, as laid down in iron-clad procedures.
Flexibility in this latter case requires ‘good professional standing’ as a baseline, and erasing ‘personal’ entirely. Whether you like a person in your team, or not, is of no concern. Moreover, a team member who performed flawlessly in a previous team, may be an ill fit in this new team. In other words, where people you worked with previously may remember you as being ‘easy going’, a real ‘people manager’, they may discover that you can be a real *asshole*, extremely ‘task oriented’, because the team, and task at hand, demands it. Not too many people acquire this skill, because their starting point remains their own personality, which is predictable like clockwork, and they pride themselves because of it. We all know these people from the media, and from the mirror.
In fact, the moment someone in charge is exposed through the media, they will ‘frame’ him or her, limiting his or her use of flexibility in the way I described above, as a leader adapting to the team and the circumstances. Now, this banker friend I described was not flexibel, and more likely to act in a highly predictable way, and several people who spoke at his funeral mentioned this in anecdotes, which is not a bad trait if you want a ‘trusted banker’, right? Still, like I said, though ‘personal’ was clearly his point of departure, he wouldn’t allow ‘personal’ to become a drag. But he fully assumed others were ‘grown-ups’ too, until they failed to deliver, and then painful amends had to be made, like a banker pulling the plug. With two other neighbors he formed a trio of ‘Grumpy Old Men’, who could be seen at the sidewalk café nearby, discussing world affairs from a personal perspective, not mincing words, and one of them frequently offered as his opinion that a person he did not agree with ‘had to be shot’. I myself maintained good relationships with the three of them, with two of them gone within a year, but I’m not as ‘committed’ to serve the world in such a way. Not yet, anyway. And I fear the moment where ‘personal’ is becoming the default attitude of people in a leadership position, even though I’m done with the ‘host’/‘hostess’ mode of trying to ‘manage’ a country like it is a corporation with unlimited funds.
My own excuse for not calling it a day, and leave it to others to comment on world affairs, is not the result of a drive towards perfectionism and to complete a certain ‘task’, but an unending curiosity in the people in the ‘team’, and this challenge to ensure that this ‘European’ team I’m part of will set the standard for the next generation. I’m simply curious to know which pathways are (still) available to overcome the mounting opposition from people who insist that ‘personal’, their individuality as a benchmark, are still left open. To stop those with their right to hate others, destroy entire countries, and bring a flame-thrower to meetings, glue themselves to priceless works of art, and kill journalists, or lock them up for pointing out ‘inconvenient facts’. These people who drowned out the ‘managerial class’ of ‘shopkeepers’ and ‘window dressers’. Whenever I advertise iron-clad procedures (the rule of law) and a well established routine (common decency) as essential for the kind of leadership I value, which I know is be able to deliver, while running a smooth operation optimized to satisfy team members, as well as the company (society within a country), I am aware of the fact that a desire to go to war and smash everything may trump the desire to work towards reaching this championship within a team, killing the goose which is laying the golden eggs. This primitive urge taking over is an enigma. To point out that it happened before, with marvelous civilizations being razed to the ground, is not an explanation.
People studying the rise and fall of civilizations, with a focus on how a society developed, often point to the initial stages of authoritarian conquest, building an empire, giving way to a next phase where ‘wise leaders’ expand the empire, until ‘manager types’ who have no clue, handing out rewards for participating, and/or serving their friends and themselves with ‘bonuses’ until the decline is unstoppable, do have a point. But in my perception these three ‘skill’ types of leadership are available at every phase. Why is it that we allow ‘decadence’ to bury the rule of law and common decency? Like I said in my previous contribution, I do not object to people who like to dress up, and do parades in principle. As long as they pay for it themselves, and clean up behind them. And I welcome those ‘drag queens’ to my team, unless they are still in ‘party mode’, and I’m unable to switch them off, and focus on the task at hand. Does that sound cruel to you?