01/04/2013
Six post-macho principles for the successful manager in the hyper-interactive future:
1.Relationships require listening. Relationships -- with customers, employees, or lovers -- involve a give-and-take. Each party has to listen to the other, which is something women seem to be much better at than men (in my own experience, just sayin'). So instead of crafting algorithms and spreadsheets to plot which of your customers are the most and least valuable to you (a macho management preoccupation), design some "Golden Questions" for your customers, so you can listen better to what they say they really need!
2.Think long-term. Short-term thinking is macho-management at its best and probably the single most threatening affliction for business executives (and politicians) today. But relationships aren’t built quickly, and they grow stronger with time. For a business, customers are the mechanism that links short-term actions and long-term value, because customers have memories, and how you treat them today will affect how much value they create for you tomorrow.
3.Hierarchies are out. Collaboration is in. For the last two hundred years or so, corporate organizations were strictly hierarchical, with authority flowing down from the top, while information flowed up from the bottom. No longer. Today, the lowliest employee can jump the hierarchy with a tap to her smartphone. Top-down organization, as a form of command-and-control macho management, is fading fast.
4.Rules and structure don’t matter. Culture and informal customs make the difference now. Automation is a macho mechanism for streamlining predictable processes and accomplishing tasks. But in a more rapidly changing world, with ever more unpredictable innovations and disruptions, dealing with unanticipated situations will be more important. Culture – the unwritten rules that govern how an organization’s members behave – will be the single most important factor in determining how your organization weathers the next unexpected social media conflagration or disruptive innovation.
5.Empathy is king. Macho management principles allow a business to pad its current-period bottom line by exploiting a customer’s mistakes, oversights, or lack of knowledge. But relationships succeed based on mutual empathy, which for a business means seeing things from the customer’s perspective, treating different customers differently, and demonstrating genuinely good intentions toward them. Proactively protecting the customer's interest is the new standard.
6.Share and be shared with. In the e-social era, with technology-facilitated relationships blossoming all around us, remember that people have an urge to share, so macho-inspired monetary incentives and purely economic inducements are not always useful. In the social domain, in fact, they can be counter-productive. Share your ideas, your technology, and your data, in order to inspire more sharing and faster innovation. And begin figuring out what it means to trust others the way you want them to trust you.
Posted by:
Don P. in Twitter
