BoyneIan Boyne, Contributor
SO MUCH attention is paid to Government and its macroeconomic policies, interest rates, exchange rate, inflation, that very often critical reforms at the firm level hardly enter the discourse.
Government is certainly responsible for designing appropriate macroeconomic policies and in providing the policy framework within which entrepreneurs can operate. Government needs to reduce bureaucratic hurdles and provide the enabling environment for companies to grow. But what is the role of management in economic growth and how prepared is Jamaican management for the daunting challenges of globalisation?
TOP-DOWN MANAGEMENT
We start with certain cultural deficits such as a traditionally authoritarian, command -and- control management heavily influenced by our plantation history. As a society, at all levels, we don't handle power well. Power tends to corrupt under normal circumstances and across cultures, but in the Jamaican culture, bred by the history of slavery and stratification, the problem of the abuse of power is particularly acute. Unless as a society we construct healthy ways of dealing with power, we will be ill prepared for the challenges of globalisation.
Jamaicans are highly ambitious materially and with a declining dollar and consequent rising cost of living, many are going to be increasingly frustrated that their salaries are not able to meet their desires. How will these workers and professionals work with enthusiasm and gusto, increase productivity and deliver the quality products and services needed for Jamaica to be competitive?
The challenge to Jamaican management will be to motivate employees to give their best and to commit themselves unswervingly to excellence and first-class production when their real incomes are declining and companies want them to accept single-digit increases. People's tempers are going to be short, their patience will wear thin and their frustration level will be high in this environment. The arrogant, bossy, domineering, disrespectful and insensitive manager and supervisor will certainly not be getting the best out of workers unless that manager develops certain emotional competencies.
Many of our managers are getting expensive MBAs and if they are worth a fraction of what they cost, those degree programmes should have prepared them adequately in emotional mastery.
Increasingly, the avant-garde management experts and scholars are recognising that technical and intellectual skills are necessary but not sufficient in dealing with the challenges of management. It is now the accepted common sense in management studies that emotional intelligence is critical to success in business.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) has for years been carrying cutting-edge essays by the leading management experts and scholars who have demonstrated the importance of emotional competencies. In an article titled "The Young and The Clueless" in the December 2002 issue of the HBR, two managers of the Awareness Program for Executive Excellence at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina and a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Boston University School of Management called on CEOs and senior executives to tie managers' promotions to their emotional competencies, and not just to technical skills and intellectual acumen.
How many times in our own experience have we found very competent, highly trained and intellectually brilliant managers who were absolutely obnoxious, arrogant and boorish excuses for human beings!
These persons cannot motivate subordinates and colleagues and end up being abysmal failures in their companies because they just did not have the people skills required for success. If Jamaica is to be competitive in the global marketplace and to produce the quality goods and services required, we have to produce a cadre of senior executives and CEOS who have strong inter-personal skills and who know how to empathetically and compassionately deal with people, and who inspire confidence and loyalty.
VALUES AND ATTITUDES IN THE WORKPLACE
In their article in the December issue of the Harvard Business Review Kerry Bunker, Sharon Ting and Kathy Kram, who have a combined coaching and teaching experience of 55 years, lament the fact that "most executives seek out smart, aggressive people, paying more attention to their accomplishments than to their emotional maturity".
Continue the authors: "Research has shown that the higher a manager rises in the ranks, the more important soft leadership skills are to his success. Our colleagues at the Center for Creative leadership have found that about a third of senior executives derail or plateau at some point, most often due to an emotional deficit such as the inability to build a team or regulate their own emotions in times of stress.
It's one thing to understand the importance of relationships at an intellectual level, it's another matter entirely to develop a full range of interpersonal competencies like patience, openness and empathy. Emotional maturity involves a fundamental shift in self-awareness and behaviour and change requires practice, diligence and time".
It turns out that a values and attitudes campaign is not just necessary nationally but ought to be narrowly focused at the firm level, too. If we are really serious about increasing production and productivity and in boosting exports, we can't look at economic and political factors alone. We have to put a lot of emphasis on the human element. We have to look to the quality of our human relationships and interactions.
The authors of "The Young and Clueless" essay begin with the account of a 36-year old manager who was "brilliant, creative, energetic, aggressive -- a strategic and financial genius", who had risen fast through the ranks because of his outstanding performance. Until he hit upon a crisis. The authors show that had he understood the value of building relationships with his peers, the crisis would have been predictable. He is not a person known for empathetic listening. He was only "half aware of how others see him and to the extent that he knew he did not care". Sounds like many managers and bosses we know in Jamaica.
Teamwork, humility, respect for colleagues and especially subordinates are not strengths of the typical manager; and in Jamaica these weaknesses would be amplified. Putting certain managers in positions of authority robs them of the opportunity to develop emotional competencies, the authors advise. The authors counsel top management: "The good news is that if you succeed in convincing them (managers) that these (emotional) issues are career threatening, they may apply the same zeal to their emotional development that they bring to their other projects."
The authors make the important point that, "At some point in a young manager's career, usually at the vice-president level, raw talent and determined ambition become less important than the ability to influence and persuade. And unless senior executives appreciate this fact and make emotional competence a top priority, these high-potential managers will continue to fail, and often at significant cost to the company".
Those who are familiar with the latest management thinking and the best management scholarship can't help but be struck by the fact that many of the values which were learnt in Sunday school are the same values being extolled at Harvard, Yale and MIT and other Ivy League universities today. The recently published Toxic Emotions at Work: How Compassionate Managers Deal with Pain and Conflict reads like some of the advice given by Jesus, the Gospel writers, Buddha and Confucius. But these principles work. Character really matters; values are really critical and business success is not just about crunching numbers, brilliant marketing strategies, first-rate production techniques and highly skilled workers.
OPENNESS
The HBR essay speaks of the importance of transparency and the willingness of senior executives to be open about their weaknesses and to solicit honest feedback. It suggests that top management weave inter-personal goals "into the fabric of the organisation, where everyone is expected to demonstrate a specific set of emotional skills and where criteria for promotion include behaviours as well as technical ability".
"Taking the time to build people's emotional competencies isn't an extravagance; it's critical to developing effective leaders". How many man hours have been lost in Jamaica simply because managers don't know how to talk to and relate to employees and are emotionally incompetent. You can't divorce productivity issues from those of emotional competence-or, simply put, one's ability to deal with people and build effective synergies.
The September 2002 Harvard Business Review also has a fascinating essay on "What Makes Great Boards Great". It mentions some famous companies which crashed in the United States and showed that their boards met many of the regularly cited criteria for good boards. Many followed accepted rules, procedures and principles. There were no structural problems. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Associate Dean for executive programmes at the prestigious Yale School of Management, and founder of the school's Chief Executive Leadership Institute in Atlanta, has spent 25 years studying board performance and CEO leadership.
He found a simple thing which creates great boards and which distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful. In a sub-titled section "The Importance of the Human Element", he says that what separates equally talented boards is this: "Well-functioning, successful teams usually have a chemistry that can't be quantified - Team members develop mutual respect; because they respect one another they develop trust; because they trust one another they share difficult information; because they all have the same reasonably complete information, they can challenge one another's conclusions coherently; because a spirited give and take becomes the norm, they learn to adjust their own interpretations in response to intelligent questions".
It all comes down to values and attitudes. We in Jamaica tend to pooh-pooh such "soft" matters. Members of our intelligentsia like to see themselves as hard-nosed, empirically focused, cerebral. Perhaps we should read some more, do some reflection and come out of our narrow cocoon and realise what is really taking place in the wide, wide world. With the proliferation of MBA programmes in Jamaica, let's hope that those taking back the degrees to companies are not just prizing them for the increased salaries and status which they bring.
