When you're young, you look at television and think, "There's a conspiracy! The networks have conspired to dumb us down." But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
- Steve Jobs
It all starts with this same basic question or concern: can I trust the intentions of the people in the organization?
And that's a question that very rarely gets asked. So, if you ask that question, then you have obviously one of two conclusions, either yes or no. Either I think people don't really give a damn, that you don't care about the health of the organization, in which case, by golly, I definitely have to manipulate them. Or I believe that actually almost everybody who works here actually wants to be part of an organization that's successful, they actually aren't trying to undermine the organization, they're not actually trying to make our profits go down, they're not actually trying to turn off our customers and cause us to kind of have a desperate and kind of mean-spirited approach to our work - that these things are happening somehow as a byproduct of how we're working together, not because they reflect the actual intentions of the people in the organization.
This is really a core question, and I think all leadership kind of starts with this question. It really has to do with beliefs about people's intentions.
If you believe the people in an organization actually, by and large - there could always be a few exceptions, of course - but the vast majority of people in the organization actually have the wellbeing of the organization at heart, then your attitude towards are they learning the right thing or wrong thing changes completely. Then you would say, "Ah, they seem to be heading in this direction, or a lot of things are going on that we don't think are in the best interest of the organization. We should try to understand why."
Either people don't see the consequences of their current action or they don't see what's possible, they think they're doing the best they possibly could but there's just a level of awareness they don't have, in which case we should pick them up and take them over here and have them visit another organization, which is one of the best uses, all the benchmarking stuff, much of which I don't think has been very useful.
But without doubt, the most reliable, useful aspect of benchmarking is usually people leave their context, go to another context, and they go, "Ah, oh my gosh, it never dawned on me that that was possible." Then they come back, they're all fired up, and they think they can do still better. You see, the problem wasn't intention, the problem was awareness. They just thought that what they were doing was the best they could be doing.
So, if you really believe people's hearts are in the right place, then you are asking very different questions. What's keeping us from doing what's possible? What's keeping people in a state of resistance to change? What's keeping people from developing capacities that would allow them to behave or operate in very different ways? All of those are different kinds of questions. Those are actually all learning questions because they would require management, or whoever has some authority, to actually be learning about the organization, as opposed to learning how to manipulate the organization to do what they want it to do.
- Peter Senge, Senge on Leadership
