‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have a purpose, bring others along, plan properly, organise resources and implement the changes. Great organizations give people autonomy, their leaders communicate well and, above all, exhibit great alignment with their business goals’.
The above 3 statements belong to what I call ‘Impossible to disagree with school of management’ and represent a great deal of content seen in posts, books, reports and, even worse, ‘the latest research’. This lazy thinking brings zero value to the party. It is however, easy to produce and highly magnetic. It generates lots of ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ which grows quickly in the LinkedIn petri dish.
Infuriatingly, people who jump into declaring agreement, don’t just say ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ (exasperating in itself) but tend to repeat the proposition. That is ‘I could not agree more with you Peter. Indeed, good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example’.
I am highly suspicious of anything that seems to produce tranquilizer effects in the mind, that does not generate the slightest restlessness. In a recent post, whose authorship will remain private, I found an article that happily declares 20 reasons why change fails. You could easily add ‘bad weather’, ‘climate change’ and ‘long Covid’ and the article would stand, obviously highly enriched.
The ‘Impossible to disagree with’ school of management might as well also be called ‘The School of Not Thinking’.
The famous ‘Not even wrong’ category, attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli to describe a very poor argument that does not even reach ‘wrong’, should have a sister category in our Platitude Management Industry called ‘Not even challengeable’. My view is that entire libraries of management books, HBR articles and ‘latest research’ could dwell happily there.
Please disagree. Even, just a bit.
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