Líderes, Casos de la Vida Real

If you watch or used to watch Televisa, you might have come across, whether in the 80’s or more recently, to Silvia Pinal’s TV show “Mujer, Casos de la Vida Real”. While I do not think that I have ever watched the show – not least because I became allergic to TV from the early 90’s on – nor would possibly want to publicly admit to it in the event that I ever had, I “directionally” know that it illustrates, based on true stories, how people managed difficult situations.

I want to refer to this as a parallel to my own journey; not that it was a difficult one – today I am not here to whine – but better said, to illustrate how we progress in our thinking and ways to handle situations and life in more general as we build up our experience.

I was – and still am – very good at criticizing things that are a bit shaky or do not work well, as well as at identifying flaws; after all, am I not, at least from birth, French, Vaterland of a whole range of reactionists ranging from the Yellow Jackets up to people who proudly claim the legacy of paratroopers who disgracefully slaughtered people during French colonial wars? When a few decades ago a truck company for which I was working was taken over by another, financially much better managed company and our sales quickly went South coincidental with the start of “synergies implementation”, I could not resist but to use my deep knowledge of the acquired company (excuse my modesty on this one), its history (I am a bit like Janus – not that I am driving forward looking in the rear-view mirror, but I conversely see some benefits of knowing where we are coming from in order to understand where and why we are at the point where we are, and to be better equipped to navigate the future), and more importantly the preferences and priorities of its customers basis to analyze where we were failing. Part of this was in fact directly traceable to our own doo-doo, as we were facing strong headwinds from a lack of reliability of the latest evolution of our otherwise legendary engine; part of this was the another direct consequence of the closure of an assembly plant and botched transfer to an half-empty plant of our new parent resulting in deterioration of quality, longer delivery times, higher costs, limitations in the breadth and depth of products, etc.,, something too late to fully unwind, and with compounding difficulties when partly unwound years later; asymmetric resourcing and product alignment had also messed up our margins – you get the point: a fleury of actions that had contributed to destroying more value for the customers than they had been creating internally; and decided to start my own “crusade” to try to restore sales to the benefit of the whole, newly created group (spoiler alert before I continue elaborating on this: it ended up a bit like the story of the Knights Hospitaller and Napoleon in Malta, or the Melians and the Greeks in the not-too-distant Peloponnese centuries earlier; power and justice, or lack thereof, can be interrelated).

Flashback to an earlier part of my life, when I was seeing something not working, I was thinking that there was value in reporting it (and indeed there is, but this is only the starting point of bringing higher awareness). But at this point of my life I already knew that bringing part of the solution was equally expected and needed, as the usual reaction from leadership to such interventions is almost in all cases: “Don’t tell me that it is raining, tell me how to bring sunshine” or even “Just create that sunshine for me”. Fair enough, this is in fact good advice. It was however much more disappointing, after thoughtful efforts to find possible paths towards improvement, that the rule rather than the exception would be that suggestions would be completely ignored. Was it a symptom and the famous syndrome of “not invented here”? Were the suggestions worthless? (I still think that lesser commonality of dealers like it is the case for a competitor that has by now clocked 86 consecutive years of positive income, and lifting the internal ban for a brand to compete in a segment in which the other band had been historically underperforming were not completely stupid ideas; in fact we are now going in this direction on the latter after 25 years of errancy). Were these suggestions not aligned with the marching orders coming from the lost continent? I was not able to ever know for sure as leadership was not so open as to sharing their thoughts, but think that we can safely speculate that it was a combination of all of the above. Luckily enough, some corrective actions seem to have finally been taken now.

From this I learned 2 things:

1. Even if what one suggests is not adopted, looking for improvements is an extremely formative task: it requires that one goes deeper into the ways the business operates, understand what the drivers are for its results, what customers want and how this could evolve, etc. So one could rationalized that even in the disappointing case that we end up not being able to contribute to business improvements at a specific time, our improved knowledge can in itself and by itself be a source of satisfaction, and that this keeps holding most of its potential for later application (unless evolution is such that these elements become obsolete – yet, even in that case, we now dispose of a process to tackle situations in the future).

2. Leaders just asking for sunshine while not caring why it rains do not 100% qualify in my mind as leaders; yes, they possibly still have a lot of following, including many yes-men; but the risk is high that their impermeability to topics brought to them holds the seed of an upcoming, if not already blurred vision. Granted, leaders cannot solve everything – in most cases, their main role is not even to be managers –- but this does not mean that they should not be curious about elements affecting the company; in fact, if their role is effectively to form a vision, provide guidance, and drive engagement, the very nature of this function demands that they maintain such an understanding of the market.

The conclusion on these two juxtaposed views is that to be effective, “criticizing” must be accompanied by solutions, while “problems” must be listened to; and that actions have to be taken together, fostered by good communication.

The basic saying goes that “You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink", and is sometimes complemented by its useful corollary “but you can make it thirsty”. There are both elements of truth and limitations to this saying, but in the end, to me it mostly comes back to the importance of communication. Quite frequently, “we engineers”, and / or “we MBA” – with a double whammy when one is lucky enough (???) to hold best titles / diplomas – tend to overvalue analytic and even the less frequently mentioned synthesis skills. Oftentimes, the real enabler for these skills to bring any tangible value is social (and within this, emotional) intelligence. In this area, “some” lawyers, some CEO, and just likewise, laypeople like you ???and I ?? can be a reference.

So let’s get at it!

#anti-resume