I decided to start a new feature for the summer on the Corporate Barbarian Blog: Sun-Tzu Sunday (can a Machiavelli Monday be far behind?). Sun-Tzu was a military strategist of ancient China. Each week, I’ll present an excerpt from his treatise The Art of War. This week’s entry comes from the eighth chapter, entitled The Nine Changes:
There are Five Pitfalls
For a general:
Recklessness,
Leading to
Destruction;
Cowardice,
Leading to
Capture;
A hot temper,
Prone to
Provocation;
A delicacy of honor,
Tending to
Shame;
A concern for his men,
Leading to
Trouble.
Substitute “manager” or “leader” for “general”, and you can apply this to the modern corporation. Let’s take a look at each pitfall:
Recklessness - I’ve known lots of reckless leaders, who’ve gone off half-cocked with sketchy information to back up their ideas. I had one boss who literally would take a report from my hand and present it without even reading it. He had his head handed to him several times.
Cowardice - I had another director who was afraid to speak up to his superiors. He led them to believe that everything was going well financially, because he didn’t want to admit his mistakes. Rather than taking his lumps for the betterment of the team, he covered up the problem until it was too late to make a recovery. He was eventually asked to leave.
A Hot Temper - I spoke about “Ivan” the Engineering Director in a previous post. People may feared him, but this hampered his relationship with his employees. They were afraid to bring him bad news, and blew smoke up his butt to keep him happy. Ivan would get mad at the drop of a hat, and a vein would bulge from his forehead. My boss joked that if we could only get him angry enough, he would burst that vein…but no such luck. If he could have controlled his temper, he would have been a more effective leader.
A Delicacy of Honor - I had another coworker who, after receiving a promotion, wanted to remain “one of the guys”. This may work in some cases, but we had another guy in the department who took advantage of Mr. Softy. The guy who took advantage walked all over our new boss, disappearing during the afternoons and shirking his responsibilities. It really hurt the morale of the rest of the department when we saw what he was getting away with, and the reputation of the boss suffered as well.
A Concern for his men - Facing cuts to the defense budget in the early 1990’s (my how some things never change), my company at the time was preparing to downsize. There was a budget call, and we had to project our manpower requirements for the next 18 months. When we compared the requirements to the existing staff, the results weren’t pretty. Layoffs had to be made if the company was to survive. One manager held on to his people, even as it was apparent that several of them had no work to do. His inability to pull the trigger on the layoffs might have given his people a few months of extra paychecks, but he burned up valuable budget in the process. If he would have taken decisive action, and made the hard choices, he wouldn’t have put the company into a deeper hole.
Have you been faced with these five pitfalls in your career? How did you respond to them?
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