Recently I came across a list of behaviours which the writer claimed would help me to be effective and productive. At first glance it was quite a surprising collection of characteristics. In the first instance, the writer assumed that the readers would have a belief in what they were doing, that they were aligned with the way in which their organisation was going. His next recommendation was that people should behave with integrity; the ends do not justify the means and, as has been demonstrated in many spheres of life recently, a wrong act can unravel a right outcome. But integrity does not justify innocence or naivete and so people should strive for understanding; in some ways this can seem to be quite a burdensome responsibility and it does not seem to allow for the ‘I was only taking orders’ line of excuse. The understanding should be built with honesty and the integrity should be informed by the understanding. What understanding provides is knowledge and with knowledge comes power which the next behaviour, self control is presumably meant to temper.
I think here the distinction is between using our knowledge to outperform our fellows, which is acceptable and using it to humiliate them, which is not. The writer then seems to underline his point by requiring patience. Are they not the same thing? Perhaps not; perhaps self control acts as a filter on our actions and patience acts to attenuate our thoughts and our emotions; so it is not only how we act that is important but how we think and feel. What patience does is anchor the self control and put it into the context of relationships and what is emerging is a picture of the model which the writer has of how we should behave in a community. We tend to think of patience and self control as being very passive behaviours but in this context they are actually very active behaviours because what the writer is advocating is the building of relationships. We are building the capacity to act when the time is right and to act decisively and with impact. What is clear by now is that the writer is expecting his audience to accept the responsibility he is offering and to act pretty autonomously.
The next behaviour he asks for is true commitment; whoops, where is the ‘get out’ clause? ‘Too late’ is his answer; if we are looking for authority and we want to exercise it responsibly, there is a cost and our full commitment is it. If we cannot give it, we should go back to the beginning and question the vision. Our commitment should be emotional, psychological and intellectual; it is an outworking of the integrity that we agreed to earlier. This commitment is to the cause but that is not enough, we need to be committed to our fellows whoever they may be and to behave well towards them. To those with whom we agree to be co-workers we owe a deeper level of commitment; interestingly, this was touched on today by Steve Farber, a leadership coach, in a conversation starter for Harvard Business Publishing where he was strongly advocating a commitment to mentoring. Read it if you dare to see the word ‘love’ in the context of a working relationship.
So where does this get us? A long way from the ‘work harder and work faster’ view of productivity; a long way even from the ‘work smarter’ view. It gets us to a point where relationships are seen as having an important bearing on our effectiveness and productivity. If that is the case, perhaps HR responsibilities should be transferred back to line.