Miracle management can change your life
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By Christine Cowan-Gascoigne
We are all familiar with the concept:
Each statement, some so common that they are cliches, has
been proven and re-proven - by scientific experiment and
observation - to be true.
Intellectually, we know this, our parents knew it, and so did
their parents. Even our children have been taught this is
true. Yet we do not live as if we believed it.
We construct a juvenile and adult criminal justice system
that punishes, secondary schools that give detentions freely
(leaving a book in a classroom once earned my daughter a
10-minute detention), parents who routinely ground or spank
their children and organizational "performance management"
systems that clearly spell out the steps to getting fired
(it's called the "disciplinary process") but no equivalent
process for getting promoted. As a society, we have failed
repeatedly to act on our most fundamental and widely held
beliefs.
The disconnect between what we believe and what we do occurs
whenever we feel attacked. If the flies bite, we want to
attack back and make them as miserable as we are. They don't
deserve honey! We want to "get even" with the 17-year-old who
steals our car, we want to make him pay for his actions. And
so we turn our backs on the intellectual knowledge that
honey, positive reinforcement, praise and catching someone
doing something right (i.e., kindness and love) would be far
more effective in the long run.
And we perpetuate exactly the kind of environment that
created the criminal or problem employees in the first place:
hostile, fearful and attacking. Hostile, attacking behavior
engenders hostile attacking behavior, over and over again.
The cycle can be broken by informed judges who reduce
sentences (as in the British nanny case), by wise individuals
who refuse to feel attacked (such as the Amish family in Ohio
who visited and forgave the young man in jail who had driven
drunk into their buggy, killing four of their children) and
by managers who see their chance to work miracles -
literally- by seeing the good in each and every worker and
each and every situation.
Managers who see the best in us and bring out the best in us
are often the catalysts for miraculous transformations. So be
one of those managers and work a miracle for your employees.
The healing will be as much yours as theirs.
Cowan-Gascoigne is founder and president of The Leadership Co., a Cleveland consulting firm. She was formerly an executive at the Cleveland Clinic and a consultant with McKinsey & Co. This article was originally printed in the Working Women column in the Business section of The Plain Dealer on Sunday, December 21, 1997. |