August 2005 |
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 Why Soft is Hard Ah, the soft stuff. That part of management and leadership that perplexes and outright frustrates many businesspeople. If we could just focus on tasks and goals and forget the squidgy emotional soft stuff we'd get a lot more done, right? Well, certainly, especially if we were made of metal. After the first week of a masters program in executive leadership, I remain convinced that the soft stuff - values, creating high morale, interpersonal intimacy, idealism, non-caustic relationships and the like, is very hard for many executives to make sense of, much less employ wisely. Why? Well, at the very least it's because the American business system does not place much emphasis on it. The very term, "soft" (fluffy is another one) hints at how much credence we give it; it's a scoffing term. The Harder the Better  Another reason businesspeople skip over the interpersonal or "fluffy stuff" is that we're not taught in our education at any level outside perhaps kindergarten, useful strategies for working with it. Heck, we hardly learn how to prepare ourselves to be married or in a long-term relationship, but for trial and error. We are not taught enough about enriching relationships and maintaining high ethics while achieving concrete goals. We didn't start learning early enough. We're warned what might happen if we transgress against laws, but we're not really brought up appreciating the tangible advantages of being part of a harmonious community, much less strategies for creating one. Heck, I bet many of you read the word harmonious and thought of group hugs or singing Kumbaya. If you did, you are not alone. Too many heads of business have little appreciation for blending a relentless goal focus with the relational attitudes and behaviors that make for strong and vital working communities – and because they have little experience with it, they don’t understand it – and so see little commercial, much less personal value in it. And wherever there is little appreciation, there is little investment. Hard is good. Soft is bad. Numbers are easier to work with than values. Hard is results-oriented. Soft slows things down. Why do we need to talk so much? Hard is measurable. Soft defies measurement. What's the tangible value of this morale approach? Hard is rewarded. Soft can't be deposited in the bank. You either make the numbers or you don't. And on and on. A Strategy for New Possibilities  What I find most interesting and distressing is how pervasive is the belief that we can't have both numerical success and demonstrable values of enriching relationships and maintaining unwaveringly high ethics. Shouldn’t we be going for all of that simultaneously? Of course we should, and it requires a new way of thinking. If you've read my other articles, you've seen this idea several times: eliminating binary thinking - the habitual on or off, all or nothing, you're with us or against us, you or me, up or down, right or wrong, black or white, soft or hard, this or that, either/or mentality – is perhaps the wisest upgrade executives can make in their thinking. This single shift of awareness...this evolution of awareness to choose more than one thing, will invite you into a realm of possibility never imagined. The upside is your options for outcomes and ways to achieve them will multiply considerably. The downside is you’ll be required to think a lot more, which requires more time, more dialogue and more likelihood of having to say the most terrifying phrase an executive can say, “I don’t know.” All of that may be uncomfortable, and still the right way to go. Outside the tiny world of either/or - in the expanded realm of both/and thinking sits creativity just waiting to help you solve problems and seize opportunities. When you learn to see more than two options, you become wildly more valuable to your organization, whether you own it or someone else does. But, in order to see more than binary options, you've got to want to see more...and I wonder if a lot of people aren't just a little too comfy with either/or thinking to really step out of their mental and emotional cages.  You've also got to have a system for engaging with more options than just two. But, since we commonly think in pairs of mutually exclusive possibilities, we have not trained our minds to process even the idea of mutually INclusive options. Put another way, black and white is easier. Yeah, I know, that sounds so philosophical and that just makes it difficult to put into practice. Well, it may be difficult, but that is not the transformative issue. The transformative issue is: How much more can we achieve (numerically and holistically) with an improved process than we do now? What has this got to do with the soft sides of business? Well, if we’re uncomfortable with the ambiguity that comes with looking at questions from many more sides than either/or allows, we’ll set up our decision making systems for very short conversations. In very short conversations people are told to get to the bottom line, “How much money will it make us? How much will it save us?” Short conversations tend to be fixated with hard outcomes, like a sort of obsession, at the exclusion of everything else, including healthy interpersonal connections and creativity, and possibility, and unwaveringly high ethics. "What’s the bottom line? We haven’t got time!” When any possible outcome is put opposite “the bottom line” what usually wins? If you play this approach all the way out, the bottom line could be used to justify any behavior, right? Is that what we really want? Most people I talk with say no. But because they either don’t know how to or are scared to think more holistically, they revert (very quickly I might add) to using the bottom line as the justification for the way things are. Nothing can change. Status quo. Steady as she goes. It is not until we replace either/or with the intention to achieve the bottom line and other important “soft” objectives that our work-life experiences can change. A Challenge to Expore What if the goal for your department or your business were to achieve all the numerical goals and enrich relationships among everyone involved at the very same time? How might the bonding of these two commonly unpaired ideas upgrade what you achieve? What do you need to learn in order to upgrade how your group operates? If you are not in charge, what do you need to do to have a hand in creating how your group operates, and perhaps even what goals you all go for? What do you think an improvement would do to morale? (Did you know morale is a more meaningful predictor of performance than skill?)  What do you think it would do to your reputation with your customers? What do you think it would mean in your personal life if you refused to separate goal achievement and interpersonal connectedness? To learn the most in this exercise, discuss these questions with people who do not think like you do. Otherwise you’ll have done little more than construct an argument for how right you are. Is the hard stuff really the be all and end all, or might the soft stuff be equally important? Please share your thoughts. I’m interested. back to top |
