LEADERSHIP WOE
02.03.2008
Telling stories about work is a popular pass-time. Storytelling builds camaraderie among workers by sharing in-group gossip and amusing anecdotes. Frustrated workers vent their spleens by telling grievance stories to any sympathetic ear. Those in the same occupation share knowledge by telling stories that place how-to lessons into proper context. Go to any martini bar and you’ll often find besuited biz-folk guffawing and harrumphing over war stories—bragging about victories and lamenting setbacks at the hands of a dastardly foe. Idea peddlers tell stories to persuade and motivate others. Stories are the narrative form that stands the test of time because the underlying messages are easy to grasp and relate to. And good stories animate ideas in the mind.
There is now a pile of literature about the virtues of storytelling in the workplace. One literature is about how to use storytelling to make slide-presentations and speeches more bearable. Everyone’s raving about Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen (2008) on this count. There is another literature about using stories as a medium of analysis and information sharing in the workplace. Seely-Brown et al.’s Storytelling in Organizations (2004) is a widely cited example but not one I’d recommend. Stick with Seely-Brown & Duguid’s The Social Life of Information (2000). At the moment, I intend to review a few books from a third literature. This is a literature by management gurus who try to dispense wisdom by writing storybooks for aspiring leaders. These are touted as the books for those bored by typical business books—touted as such by The Wall Street Journal, at any rate.[1]
All you need to create a story is a situation, a cast, and a sequence of events that has some sort of plot. Conflict and drama will pique interest. Compelling characters help. If you want your story to cohere and convey a lesson, you’ll also need a dénouement and a moral. Add some artistic prose and you’ve got the next Beowulf on your hands. Oh … wait. I forgot: they don’t teach the arts in business and trade schools these days. And no one seems to be rushing to put them in the curriculum. So is it any wonder that leadership storybooks tend to be condescendingly literal and full of preaching, stereotypes, hokey sentimentalism, cliché, hyperbole, hand-wringing, and simplistic motives? Nope. At risk of preempting myself, these stories are about as beige as the places they’re set in.
I’ll start with The Arbinger Institute and its book Leadership and Self-Deception. Individual authors are not given credit for the book because, as the Arbinger website notes, the organisation wants to avoid “the traps and pitfalls of ego,” amongst other things.[2] That’s a bit rich given that the same web page attributes the key gimmick of the book—the “self-deception paradox”—to the Institute’s founder, C. Terry Warner (author of the fully attributed and similarly themed Bonds That Make Us Free, 2001). I suspect that some lackey scriveners have been denied their moment in the spotlight.
I wish I could say that Leadership and Self-Deception is a compelling yarn. Unfortunately, Arbinger’s preachy and artless prose make the book a bit difficult to endure. It seems as if it were written by a committee and it probably was. The underlying ideas are fairly uncontroversial but the story line is downright creepy. It’s about a conscientious and well-meaning newcomer to a company. His socialisation into the company seems more akin to an indoctrination into a cult. A group of tag-teaming high-priests put the new manager through a trial with an underlying threat of expulsion if he doesn’t wholly accept a new way of thinking and interacting with others. Most of the story takes place in a single inquisitorial chamber (a meeting room with white board). At several points, the high priests nod their approval of how the manager’s enlightenment is progressing before upping the stakes and reminding him that membership is an all-or-nothing proposition: this is how you need to think in life and work in order to measure-up and fit into the organisation’s “culture”. They share their own stories of personal inadequacy, struggle, enlightenment, and redemption in order to model the priestly humility they expect from him. These are all common tropes of religious storytelling.
That’s not an easy message to swallow for those of us who think leadership ought not infringe on individualism, critical thinking, and freedom of conscience. Sure, there will always be ground rules, established norms, and preferred modes of conduct: workplaces regulate social behaviour, as do any social institution. But an absolute relinquishment of personal style and the denial of the messy and varied nature of interpersonal relationships seems a step too far, if not breathtakingly naïve. Leadership should work in the absence of such conformity. Leadership would be easy if followers are all enthusiastic sheep. I can’t imagine who would actually endure all the tut-tuts and cajoling that this protagonist puts up with. During moments of evasiveness, the high priests reveal some of the surveillance information they’ve gathered about the manager, which gives the conversation a true inquisitorial air. Is this the apprenticeship of an authentic leader or the wet dream of a star chamber of ideological conformists?
Setting aside the conceits of the story line, there are some useful leadership insights on offer. Many managers are self-absorbed and see problems in a blaming, self-justifying way. In many cases, they themselves may be the source of the problem. But blaming leads them to view others as objects that are undeserving of respect. If unchecked, this attitude can lead the self-absorbed manager to need blameworthy colleagues to fail in order to justify their interpretation of them. Any managerial intervention that takes place while in this state of mind will just result in defensiveness and conflict. This is an escalation that ultimately harms the organization. And there you have it: the “self-deception paradox”.
According to Arbinger, the solution is to act selflessly, see others as people with needs and aspirations, and constantly look at ways to help others. This sensibility is commonly known as “servant leadership” within the larger leadership literature. It includes managers taking responsibility for the mistake that take place and promising a fix instead of looking for excuses and scapegoats. Arbinger also hails the virtues of self-reflection and constantly guarding against the “betrayal” of self absorption. Details of how to do this are not well laid out given that the characters talk nebulously about the problem as “being in the box” (not the most original nor revealing analogy).
All told, there isn’t a big payload of insight offered here, just a few mainstream nostrums. I recommend Tavris & Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not Be Me) (2007) as a much better study of self-justification and self-deception.
Next we have Patrick Lencioni, a far more prolific writer who is routinely referred to as a “noted screenplay writer.” Since his actual accomplishments as a screenplay writer aren’t actually noted by him nor the IMDb database, I can only image what kind of success he’s had there.
First, I’d point out a few things about Lencioni’s oeuvre. In contrast to Arbinger’s rite-of-passage story, Lencioni’s default is the white-knight story. A white-knight story is about a hero-outsider who saves a hapless village from some sort of dilemma. Here the white knight is a consultant (Silos, Politics & Turf Wars, 2006), a new C.E.O. (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, 2005), a retired C.E.O. turned restauranteur (The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, 2007), and a temp employee (Death by Meeting). Lencioni’s first book (The Four Temptations of a C.E.O., 1999) is a Road-to-Damascus story about personal doubt and revelation by phantoms while on a journey. His most interesting book (The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, 2000) is a treason-of-the-courtier story, although the drama is spoiled when the wannabe Iago shows himself to be a pitiful lech in the last third of the book. All of Lencioni’s stories end with a clear explanation of the main lessons, all done in executive-summary format. Only in the case of The Four Obsessions is there a lot of new ideas introduced at the end.
Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is about dealing with the fact that most work-unit meetings are boring and ineffective. According to Lencioni, they’re boring because they lack drama and are not designed-to-purpose. Too many meetings are about avoiding the tensions that come with confronting important (and sometimes touchy) subjects. These tensions wind up being discussed in side-conversations outside of the meeting where they can’t be addressed head-on. The problem is that the typical meeting is a rigid, agenda-bound chat-session that covers too wide a variety of topics, a situation which Lencioni calls a “meeting stew”. It is difficult to switch from banal administrative issues to complicated strategic issues, for example.
Thus, Lencioni advocates that a work unit make use of several different meeting formats depending on the intent: (a.) the “daily check-in” meeting, or a five-minute “huddle” at the beginning of the work day in which members quickly coordinate their day instead of relying on e-mail and phone interruptions; (b.) the “weekly tactical” meeting, or a meeting focused on each person’s weekly priorities (during a “lightning round”), key operational issues, and urgent short-term topics; (c.) the “monthly strategic” or “ad hoc strategic” meeting, or a meeting in which everyone discuss one or two topics in depth for a lengthy period of time (three or four hours, or whatever length that is necessary to do a subject justice); and (d.) the “quarterly off-site review”, or a retreat that looks at strategic and team issues comprehensively. If people raise an issue during the wrong type of meeting, then it should be set aside until the right meeting can take place. Too many executives let their meetings get bogged down in short-term issues and spend too little time discussing matters in any detail, argues the author.
I’m not sure that this specific collection of formats would accommodate every workplace, and Lencioni acknowledges that. I take his larger point that meetings need to be better designed-to-purpose and less fixated on minor, short-term issues that relate to a select few. I’m not sure what is gained by conveying this relatively simple set of messages within an extremely long story. The number of pages devoted to back-story tangents is truly enormous. This wouldn’t be a problem if there was interesting character development, but that’s simply not the case. Throughout Lencioni’s book, you can see a film-like formula: introduce the characters; set up the predicament; describe early attempts at resolution and the inevitable setbacks; have the lead characters undergo a crisis of confidence before they adopt another tack and redouble their efforts; then build the drama to a climax, complete with satisfying ending. Unfortunately, this book is the equivalent of a three-hour epic in which the protagonists spend most of their time doing household chores. This story is way too long for what is essentially a three-page article worth of substantive lessons.
To recap, the Arbinger Institute writes stories about characters who are so preachy that it’s impossible to miss the point. It adds a lot of repetition in case the messages didn’t sink at first mention. Lencioni ends with an executive summary in case his key messages went over the readers’ heads. In the Invisible Employee, Gostick & Elton preface each chapter with an episode of a larger story. Each episode is intended to convey the messages that will be discussed more explicitly in the rest of the chapter. This switching allows the authors to illustrate and then explain. It’s done in much the same way that other pop management books will soften the reader up with an illustrative case before making a more pointed claim. Thus, none of the authors reviewed here is willing to let their story stand on its own, even though these stories offer nothing in the way of subtlety, ambiguity, or nuance.
Gostick & Elton’s book offers many useful insights about the way that reward and recognition improves employee engagement. They’re a bit opportunistic with the statistical evidence while expounding. Nonetheless, their books is a decent overview of the prevailing wisdom about recognition, except for the scientific experiments conducted on the subject (not a small omission). They talk about the costs of presenteeism (as distinct from absenteeism), or the situation whereby a fatigued, ill, demoralized, or distracted employee will show up to work but be highly unproductive. The costs of turnover are highlighted, as is the principle cause: tension between an employee and an immediate supervisor. The authors explain the limits of financial compensation and token financial inducements, instead advocating highly personalized and symbolic rewards. They even talk about some dysfunctional management habits, such as being a managerial seagull: that is, flying in only occasionally to check-up on staff, usually to dump off new work or micromanage in some way. The book concludes with a long list of employee reward and recognition suggestions. Not enough is said about the tension between highly programmatic recognition programs and perceptions of sincerity. Also, more could be said about making the work itself intrinsically meaningful and rewarding, instead of relying solely on extrinsic motivators. Nonetheless, this is a half-decent primer on the prevailing wisdom for what its worth.
While in storytelling mode, however, the Invisible Employee degenerates into pure pablum. Gostick & Elton opt to tell their story as a set of surreal parables involving two fictitious castes of people. One caste is the equivalent of managers and the other caste is composed of workers. The workers are tasked with climbing a mountain to gather valuable gems. The work is arduous and thankless, although much less so than an actual diamond mine, it seems to me. Why not a reward and recognition program in an actual diamond mine? Between the heat exhaustion, armed escorts, and cavity searches, I’m sure a reward and recognition program devised by a bureaucratic Human Resources department would do wonders for morale. Now that could form the basis for an interesting story! Instead, we get a drawn-out account of how the managers eventually come to realize the value of acknowledging the contribution of workers, while the workers learn that standing out from the crowd isn’t such a bad thing. Yawn.
All told, Gostick & Elton’s story is not far removed from a badly written children’s story or the stories that medieval landlords told uneducated serfs to get them to behave. It strikes me as strange that the authors would, at one moment, have their audience reflect on statistical evidence drawn from sophisticated studies and, at the next moment, have the same audience take seriously an utterly condescending and unrealistic story. The authors are serving up the type of parable that is sadly commonplace in New Age writing and the sanctimonious religious fiction aimed at adolescents. I suspect that this writing is so similar because it’s written by writers who lack imagination and feel obligated to stay on-message.
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that storybooks for managers are anything but a cottage industry. Depressingly, many of the books mentioned here are Business Week best-sellers. I say that is depressing partly because of the shameful quality of the prose. It’s also because the analytical detail and rigour is completely lost with formulaic tales about generic workplaces.
Stories can do a great deal to make fragmented information cohere into something recognizable that we can all relate to. It can also teach general principles and illustrate their implementation. A clever writer can open the imagination and make people perceive the world in a new way. Yet there are dangers too. Storytellers embellish and exaggerate. They simplify motives and resort to simplistic causal explanations. Stories encourage people to pay greater attention to anecdotal evidence over systematically gathered research. They also tend to be self-serving, as you will find by listening to any war story or grievance story.
These dangers certainly apply to the books reviewed here. These may be fictional stories. But the authors all claim to be revealing truths about empirical reality. After reading this particular set of books, I’d add a few more concerns to my list. First, these books take far too much space to bestow rather basic lessons. Stories don’t necessarily have to be long. These writers have yet to discover the art of short-story writing. Second, this brand of managerial story-telling has little tolerance for subtlety and ambiguity. There isn’t much room for reflection. All the messages are obvious. This is a departure from those management case-studies that try to describe experiences and leave it up to readers to reach their own conclusions. In other words, these management storybooks are all sell-jobs. Third, the stories all seem rather phony. Stories told by insiders are a mix of story-line and technical detail. These writers are all consultants and it shows.
Review by Peter Stoyko
Update (09.09.2009)
When I wrote that The Arbinger Institute is peddling a cultish fable, I didn’t know that the organisation is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s a city known for its religiosity, if I can put it that way. I was a bit worried when I found out. I thought, “What if readers think I’m slagging these guys off because of a stereotype of Utahans?” As I was reviewing that book, I just thought Arbinger’s use of religious tropes was obvious. So I let the matter slide. But something strange has happened in the meantime: according to ordinary site-metrics, this review gets regular weekly visits from people who Google the combined terms “Arbinger Institute” and “cult”. Now I’m curious. What’s the story there?
NOTES
[1] “‘Reluctant Guru’ Pens Best Sellers for Readers Bored by Business Books,” The Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2006.
[2] http://www.arbinger.com/en/faqs.html [accessed on April 19, 2008]
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