"Everyone is Replaceable" and Other
Business Lies
"Everyone is replaceable" is a
lie, thankfully. If we were truly hiring people who could be replaced at any
moment, we'd be doing a terrible disservice to our customers and shareholders.
Yet we hear the expression all the time: "Everyone is replaceable."
Really?
What an awful thing to say, or to
believe!
Some people believe that the best part of
the Industrial Revolution was the idea to mechanize work -- to chop up a
process into such small parts that a trained rhesus monkey could be trained to
do any one of the parts in no time. In fact, that process of dumping down the
work that our employees perform is the worst idea the business world has ever
had.
When work is boring and trivial, who
cares about doing it well? I've done boring and pointless jobs, and you
probably have, too. It's a complete waste of human ingenuity.
If we aren't hiring people to do
complicated things and use their brains every day at work, then we should
automate our processes and be done with it.
Plenty of procedures formerly performed
by people have been automated already.
Only fearful managers say "Everyone
is replaceable." Fearful managers say other hateful things, too, things
like "I don't pay you to think" and "That's my decision, not
yours." Those fearful statements make it easy to tell which managers are
deserving of your talents and which aren't.
"Everyone is replaceable" is
one of my favorite Business Lies. If it's true in a given organization, then
the place is headed for bankruptcy. If we aren't allowing people to bend and
stretch their job descriptions, to have great ideas and push those ideas
throughout our organizations, then we're idiots and don't deserve to be in
leadership roles.
If we truly believe that anyone can be
replaced in a heartbeat, why would anyone with a good brain want to work for
us?
If you own stock in the company where the
managers say "Everyone is replaceable," get rid of that stock now! Better yet, go to a shareholder's meeting and
start a campaign to oust the current CEO and bring in someone who understands
how to lead people, and how to motivate a team.
Another Business Lie is "If you
can't measure it, you can't manage it." That's completely false!
You can manage all kinds of things that
you can't measure, like the goodwill of your customers and the good energy on
your team. Not only can you manage them, you must. In business, managing the
intangibles is much more important than managing columns and rows.
We are addicted to managing numbers. We
think numbers are the language of business - yet another lie!
Fearful managers obsess about metrics,
merely because metrics are tangible. We can point to them. Look how many
companies showed great numbers on all their spreadsheets right up until the
minute they didn't, and then they failed. Those poor foolish managers gave all
their attention to particles and failed to notice the waves swelling and
crashing around them.
Any human endeavor takes place in an
energy field. We have to pay attention to that energy, cultivate the good
momentum and quickly identify and deal with bad energy when it creeps in. In
other words, we have to manage the waves.
That doesn't mean putting people on
probation or firing them. It means being human, telling the truth about our own
faults and worries as managers and allowing our teammates to be fallible
humans, too.
In our work at Human Workplace, the
energy blockers we see most often have to do with fear and trust. Energy gets
dammed up in an organization and people get frustrated when there's a big
problem that no one is talking about. It's the elephant in the room.
The elephant could be anything. It might
be slipping market share or the fact that no one believes the upcoming product
release is really what customers need.
No one wants to name the elephant, but
the energy field reflects the energy blockage nonetheless. Eventually something
erupts and everyone looks around for someone to blame.
We don't have to run our organizations
that way. We can talk about fear and trust every day, because fear and trust
are business topics as surely as product returns and markdowns are.
We can talk about feeling anxious and not
being sure what to do next. It takes a real leader to be that honest with his
or her team. People will follow a truth-telling leader to the ends of the
earth. Can you be that strong as a leader?
Another Business Lie we hear all the time
is "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It." Most of us in the West grew up
with the break/fix mentality. We leave things alone until they go haywire. We
only do this in business, not in other important areas of our lives!
When we plant a garden, we don't say
"There are weeds among the vegetables, but I haven't been told to pull
them out, so I won't" and wait to react until the weeds have choked the
vegetables to death.
We constantly check on our children to make
sure they're healthy and happy. We don't view our own health or our family's
health as something to ignore until there's a crisis. In business, we tend to
downplay the constant stream of little signals we receive from the universe,
courtesy of our five (or six) senses.
People in a business know when something
needs attention that it isn't getting, whether it's the sales order processing
system or a talent-repelling recruiting apparatus. They know about it, but fear
of saying the wrong thing or offending a higher-up keeps them silent.
We don't talk about things that need
attention, because someone has told us "It's not your job to worry about
that." Everyone gets hurt when the system finally collapses under the
weight of its problems.
We can make every workplace a Human
Workplace and ask every one of our workmates every day "What's up? What's
new?"
We can listen to what they tell us. We
don't have to rely on Employee Engagement Surveys and formal systems to tell us
what's happening right under our noses. We don't have to repeat the Business
Lies "Everyone is replaceable," "Numbers are the language of
business" and "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."
None of these things are true.
Godzilla, the scaly reptilian edifice of
nineteenth-century business rules and thinking, is falling apart - and not a
moment too soon! We can hasten his demise and usher in the Human Workplace
together.
We can replace fear with trust and bring
ourselves to work completely, the same way we bring ourselves to the gym and
the car wash and the preschool holiday pageant. It's not hard to do. We just
have to listen to our bodies and tell the truth to make it happen.
Today is the perfect day to start!
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141209145608-52594--everyone-is-replaceable-and-other-business-lies
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