Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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Make use of the stress diffusion techniques described in Chapter 2. Remember that other people cannot make you angry, only you can allow yourself to become angry. Learn from previous occasions when you have allowed emotions to damage your case and don’t repeat them. Train yourself to take nothing personally and never show defensiveness or vulnerability. If you do, you might expose an Achilles heel that your opponent can strike at. But, if you can make your opponent lose control of his temper, you will gain an enormous advantage over him.

Don’t say more than you have to (and don’t be a smartarse)

The more you talk, or seek to hog the limelight, the less effective you will be. Only talk when you have to and when you really have something valuable, insightful or pertinent to contribute to discussions or decision-making processes at work. Use logic, data and facts to support your position, not bluster, polemic or personal opinions. Whenever you can, let your actions persuade others, because they will often speak louder than any words you use or any arguments that you win. Nobody likes to feel less intelligent than another person. The trick is to make other people feel smarter than you. Once convinced of this, they will not suspect that you may have ulterior motives or be a threat to them. Never say or do anything that could be held against you. Control how you use valuable information. If you can act on information before an opponent knows about it, you can often gain an advantage.

Conceal your intentions and don’t take sides in haste

If you are going to create a stir, keep people in the dark. Do not reveal your intentions in advance. Don’t be predictable all the time and, occasionally, surprise and confound your colleagues. The only cause you should concentrate on is your own. If you have to choose sides, take your time to evaluate carefully which will be the winning one. In this context, recall the age-old adage cited earlier, ‘Fools rush in to take sides’.

Don’t fight battles you can’t win and ensure that you crush your enemies

Surrender the occasional battle if you have to, but stay focused on winning the war. Concentrate your energies and resources on important victories, not the pyrrhic ones. Life is short, opportunities are few

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and you only have so much energy to expend in locking horns with people at work. If you want to neutralize an opponent, you must know as much as possible about them. Everyone has weaknesses or skeletons in the cupboard: find out what these are, but only use them when the time is right. Timing is everything and support is vital. Make sure that you have enough supporters to support the removal or deposition of your enemy before this is proposed. Make sure that you crush them completely, or they may come back to get you at some point in the future. As the master of political skulduggery Machievelli once observed, ‘when he seizes power, the new ruler must determine all the injuries he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all.’

Summary

Having described some Machiavellian power strategies it’s important to emphasize that most people would feel very uncomfortable being involved in these kinds of power plays and political mind-games, if they were routine features of their daily working lives (professional politicians excepted). While there may be times when your survival, or the survival of a project you are involved in, forces you to make use of the ‘dark side’ of power and politics, they are ultimately self-destruc- tive. Such behaviour and strategies will, sooner or later, involve cheating and lying, as well as deceitful and malicious behaviour towards others. In time, these will eventually lead to personal or corporate selfdestruction (an issue we will return to in Chapter 12, in the context of the collapse of companies like Enron and Worldcom). Furthermore, engagement with the dark side of power and politics uses up a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources, be this at the individual, group or organizational level. These are precious commodities in most organizations these days, and highly politicized working cultures are characterized by time wasting, infighting, backbiting and cheap point scoring, rather than active engagement with the productive and creative aspects of organizational leadership and management.

Managing conflict

Many managers seem to think it is impossible to tackle anything or anyone head-on, even in business. By contrast, we at Intel believe that it is the essence of corporate health to bring a problem out into the open as soon as possible, even if this entails a confrontation. Dealing with conflicts lies at the heart of managing any business. As a result, facing issues about which there is disagreement can be avoided only at the manager’s peril. Workplace politicking grows quietly in the dark; like mushrooms, neither can stand the light of day.

(Andy Grove, High Output Management, 1984)

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We’ve seen that power and politics are natural and inevitable facts of organizational life, as individuals and groups seek to acquire influence and gain resources in order to achieve their objectives. The same principle applies to conflict, which is often the natural outcome of personal, factional or departmental power battles in organizations. It too can be regarded as a normal feature of life in all organizations. In some circumstances, it may even be essential for groups to function effectively and to remain energetic and creative because, without some degree of conflict, nothing would ever change in organizations. What leaders and managers have to strive for is an optimum level of conflict, where there is ‘enough conflict to prevent stagnation, stimulate creativity, allow tensions to be released, and initiate the seeds for change, yet not so much as to be disruptive or to deter the coordination of activities’ (Robbins et al., 2001: 510).2 In the same way that conflict (‘competition’) between firms promotes innovation and change, it can also be a useful management strategy within organizations, so long as it is managed in the right way. In the context of innovation in companies, this has been described as managing the process of ‘creative abrasion’ (Leonard and Strauss, 1999). As Nonaka has also suggested,

Employee dialogues can – indeed should – involve considerable conflict and disagreement. It is precisely such conflict that pushes employees to question existing premises and make sense of their experiences in a new way. ‘When people’s rhythms are out of sync, quarrels occur and it’s hard to bring them together,’ acknowledges a deputy manager for advanced technology development at Canon. ‘Yet if the group’s rhythms are completely in unison from the beginning, it’s also difficult to achieve good results’.

(Nonaka, 1991: 104)

The former CEO of Nissan, Carlos Gohn, who was instrumental in turning the company’s fortunes around during the 1990s, shared this approach to conflict. He was widely regarded as a good listener and someone who was able to get traditionally compliant staff at all levels to look critically at every aspect of the company’s performance (operational, organizational, strategic and interdepartmental) even if this created conflict between junior and senior staff who had been long accustomed to the hierarchical and top-down power relationships of Japanese corporations. The consequence of this approach was the creation of hundreds of new ideas and innovations to improve the company’s performance, and a fundamental shift in the company’s mind-set during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Hence, while some conflict may be useful in organizations, there are many potential sources of destructive conflict in organizations. These include interpersonal differences, group conflicts, poor communication, task and process conflicts, gender and cultural clashes, status

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distinctions (for example, between line-workers and management), interdepartmental rivalries, power differentials between groups of employees, discrimination, inequitable reward systems and so forth. So what strategies can be employed in order to maintain a manageable or optimum level of conflict or competition, while ensuring that excessive or toxic levels of these do not disrupt the workflow of a group or department?

There are a number of conflict management and resolution styles that can be used at work. More importantly, you already possess a number of other skills that are useful for dealing with conflict. The most potent of these are the communication skills covered in Chapter 3, although the leadership skills described in Chapter 1 also play an important role in conflict management, as do the team management skills identified in Chapter 5. The communication skills that can be employed when dealing with conflict include active listening, not interrupting other people while they are talking, summarizing others’ contributions, looking for win–win rather than win/lose solutions, focusing on issues rather than personalities, being aware of hostile non-verbal behaviour, coping with and diffusing emotional outbursts and anger and, most importantly, not behaving in a domineering or hectoring manner.

There are a few other techniques that can also be used in situations that are characterized by a disagreement or conflict. Invariably, these are accompanied by a lot of emotional baggage, including resentment, fear, passion and anger. This means that we should all remember to think before acting, particularly if we are going to be involved in a conflict between individuals or groups. Do you fully understand what the underlying issues and facts are? How did the conflict arise? What resolutions to the conflict might there be? We then have to get people’s adult minds refocused on the task at hand and to diffuse tensions as quickly as possible. This can be achieved through the effective use of questions, a technique I’ve come to think of as the ‘Captain Angry and Captain Zen’ approach to dealing with situations that have the potential to degenerate into open conflict. Here are some examples of this technique in action:

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perspective, the perspective of your opponent (who may well be looking for your vulnerable points) and, if possible, from the viewpoint of a neutral third party. You then need to decide, before negotiating, where you might be able to accommodate someone else’s point of view, where you can collaborate with them, or where you can give something up. This is certainly harder work than simply imposing decisions on others through coercive or legitimate means, but the outcomes are always more successful. It is vitally important to remember that, eventually, ‘the truth will out’ and the only way to come to the right decisions on any issue in organizations is through questioning and reasoned argument. These should be backed up by facts (not opinions) and presented in a manner that recognizes that others may have strong views of their own, even if they might be wrong.

If you ridicule an idea – the person feels ridiculed. If you attack an idea – the person feels attacked.

If you dismiss an idea – the person feels dismissed. If you ignore an idea – the person feels ignored. (Gould and Gould, From No to Yes, 1991)

Does this mean that we have to ‘waste time’ dealing with ideas that we consider to be useless? One of the main reasons why conflict occurs is that all humans are raised, educated and trained to put critical or evaluative thinking before creative thinking. In Chapter 3, we saw how people often categorize ideas and concepts instantly, and then slap ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ labels on these. Hence other people’s proposals become ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘perfect’ or ‘useless’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. However, reality is always more complex than this. Very few ideas are ever perfect, including our own, and very few are completely useless. Most ideas have some merits, even if they are not immediately apparent. Therefore, the creative solution is to build on what is good about a particular idea, and then try to overcome its shortcomings. In the long run, this approach can actually save us a great deal of time and effort because we will have enabled others to learn for themselves what is good, and not so good, about their ideas or proposals.

In almost all conflicts, people become angry because they believe that they are about to lose something that is important to them. This is then interpreted as an attack on their ‘territory’, not in a geographical sense, but in a psychological one. If people believe that their status, freedom, knowledge, expertise, power, control or reputations are under threat, they will become fiercely defensive. This real or imagined threat can also set in process the ‘fight/flight’ reaction to stress, with its attendant negative consequences. Trying to avoid a difficult situation or serious conflict will not make it go away. Escalating the level of conflict, by digging our heels in, will only make things worse. Hence a joint solution can only be

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Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power. He who has great power should use it lightly.

(Seneca, Roman senator and historian)

Exercise 7.2

Having read through this chapter, think about how you can make use of any new insights you may have acquired when handling power, politics and conflict in the future.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Notes

1Janus was the two-headed (or two-faced) Roman deity, who also had two sets of eyes, one pair focusing on challenges that lay ahead and the other focusing on what lay behind.

2This idea has parallels with the satisfaction/dissatisfaction process, described in Chapter 3.

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over the last 10 000 years, and even more so over the last 200 years. The big difference today, when compared with the agrarian, industrial, scientific and political revolutions of the past, is the sheer pace of change in contemporary societies and organizations. Whenever groups of employees in industrialized or industrializing countries are asked to describe what most characterizes life in their organizations today, their answers invariably include ‘change’. This ubiquitous word is derived from the Old French word, changier, and is defined here as the process of making any alterations, transformations or modifications to the way an organization or its employees operate. Almost all managers and professionals can recall personal experiences and anecdotes about change, re-engineering, restructuring, downsizing or mergers in the organizations they have worked for. This is not surprising, given that the last decade of the 20th century was variously described as ‘the age of chaos’, ‘the tech-decade’, ‘the decade of blur’, ‘the age of surprises’ and ‘the age of uncertainty’. These surprises and uncertainties include globalization, the breathtaking pace of technological innovation, the ongoing redefinition of the roles and activities of organizations, employers, trades unions and employees, the end of ‘jobs for life’ and job insecurity amongst managerial and professional employees, economic and political instabilities in most regions of the world, growing ethical and ecological challenges in business, the financial meltdown of many East Asian economies in the late 1990s, and the emergence of China as an economic superpower in the 2000s. More recently, we have also witnessed the tragic events of 11 September 2001, subsequent terrorist atrocities and the impact of the second Gulf War and its aftermath in the Middle East.

In this fast-changing and uncertain world, only a handful of companies now appear to have what it takes to thrive over long periods of time. For example, the Dow Jones Index was created in 1896 with 30 listed companies. Just one of the original 30 is still in existence: General Electric, the corporate behemoth founded by Thomas Edison in 1892. The Helsinki Exchange was created in 1921 and only one of the 12 companies that formed the first group of listed companies is still in existence: Nokia. Furthermore, the life cycles of many medium-sized and large companies are getting shorter year by year. A survey by Fortune compared the US companies that had been on their 1970 ‘Top 500’ list and discovered that one-third had disappeared by 1985. Ten years later they compared the companies on their 1980 ‘Top 500’ list and found that two-thirds of these companies had disappeared by 1995. More recently, we have also witnessed a growing number of spectacular corporate collapses. These included dozens of companies from the dotcom collapse of April 2001, and Worldcom, Enron, Tycho, Arthur Andersen, K-Mart and Global Crossing in the USA; UMP,