Two Roots to All Successes and Failures in Organizations

20 January 2003---Today's New York Times business section provides an instant case study worth noting for two important lessons. One it paints overtly; for the other, you need to read between the lines.

The story profiles an executive departure that points to the undeniable truth that business successes and failures have roots in two places: interpersonal relationships and organizational policies.

The Times' piece, Searching for Motives in Random House Ouster, tells the tale of an executive who, many say, was off-putting in her arrogant attitude of superiority. She was fired, with little love lost among her colleagues, after missing some profit targets.

Deep Beliefs Matter

The charges about the exec's alienating attitude brought back some painful and personally important memories for me.

More than two decades ago, early in my business career, a peer leaving our common employer gave me a bittersweet parting gift. He told me how annoying and off-putting my "smirk of superiority" was to those around me.

Somehow, my wisely unvoiced, but very real and immaturely arrogant thoughts of I'm better than this situation, or, I'm smarter than some of my superiors, were leaking out through the slightly upturned corners of my mouth.

My candid colleague may have been no more perceptive than anyone else, but he was more direct and more generous to me than those others who watched silently as I routinely (albeit unconsciously) made an ass of myself.

Although I'm sure I defensively feigned surprise and confusion at his charge, I instantly knew he was right. That smirk, an outward sign of inner discomfort, didn't go away instantly. But by becoming aware of it, I could strive to hold that dark, crooked, little smile in check by getting at its origins.

From False Superiority To Genuine Humility

I began the hard work of reconsidering my delusions of inflated self-importance that gave rise to my shallow, self-righteousness smirk.

My buddy's gift of candor set me on a path to first understand and then find humility#151;through an improved understanding of myself and an enhanced appreciation of others. (It probably is a strange contradiction to say that one is pursuing humility. But experiencing a genuine sense of humility became a personal quest that continues to this day through conscious awareness and, happily, less and less intentional effort. Once one assesses their relative importance in the universe, humility follows as a natural consequence.)

No one in business succeeds alone. Business is always about relationships between people. Enduring productive relationships rest on a genuine feeling of mutual respect between people.

No matter how deeply you try to keep your beliefs buried, sooner or later your true thoughts erupt or leak out. Either way, you cannot fool all the people all the time. Your true beliefs about others eventually will endear you to them or alienate you from them.

A law of the universe each of us should know and heed: Whatever you send out, even only in the silence of your own thoughts, eventually comes back to you.

Corporate Culprit

The second important lesson reflected in this Times story, is one not so obvious at first reading. But an important hint rests in this phrase describing how the ousted exec, "had few stalwart defenders among her rival division chiefs."

Note the word rival in describing fellow company associates.

Company policies that spur sparring between managers by rewarding individual effort and pitting units, departments, or divisions against each other, usually end up hurting overall long-term results.

Internal competition reinforced by individual rewards may get each self-interested person's hormonal juices flowing—but in isolation without the leverage of shared thinking and cooperative effort.

Treating every business unit as a lone island—headed by a boss rewarded by a system founded on the principle of each man for himself—discourages, even defeats, the instinct to cooperate, collaborate, and generate better results through collective, mutually beneficial, efforts.

There are enough real enemies outside your organization, you don't need to create artificial ones inside it.

For an example of how shared interests between individual unit heads helps the broader organization do better, study the policies and success stories of Nucor Steel.

The bottom line: Managerial failures, as well as successes, usually start deep within an individual's mind and are aided broadly by an organization's policies.

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