Responsible Leadership?
While you spin in your hamster wheel from week to week, year to year, trying to keep up with your managerial demands, your employees are making your company function. Who knows? Maybe in spite of you. While you’re trying to fight off managerial “burn out”, your employees are making decisions. Not all, but some of the decisions they make are based on their idea of right and wrong. Where do they come up with the reference point that guide them to what’s acceptable? You can’t write a Standard Operating Procedure for morality. While most employees come preloaded with basic life experience morality, they typically learn as they go (fake it till you make it). Ultimately, they have the potential to make business decisions with ethical consequences affecting your other employees, your customers and the general public.
What’s up with managers running our countries major corporations and those government executives running large state and federal agencies? If they’re stretching every loop hole they can find, don’t the employees working for them feel like its OK to “get theirs”? Damn right they do! Work attitudes are a significant indicator of your workplace culture. The culture breeds from the top.
If you happen to look around lately, our managers are not doing a very good job at maintaining ethical behavior. Our institutions are suspect. Every few months we hear about another major fraud, bribe, embezzlement scam with the usual cover up. Next time you’re spinning in your hamster wheel and you go into a managerial trance, think about the example you’re setting for the employees that work with you. Especially, the ones who know your name.
Technology throwing you for a loop?
The rat race being ever present, folks in a certain demographic just can’t keep up with the pace of technology. Remember the 90′s when Sony kicked ass as a leading provider of consumer electronics. We bought the next gadget they offered us and loved it. We were totally naive to Sony’s marketing plan of getting us to buy the next generation Walkman when they already had the more advanced version on the drawing board. Or perhaps you recall the computer processor speed wars of the late nineties. If you waited another six months you could have gotten another 500 mega bites. Doesn’t sound significant today but hard drives were only a couple of gigs back then. It should be no surprise that Apple is using the same merchandising scheme with their never ending versions of smart phones, audio/video players and tablets.
If you’re old enough to get the analogy reference between the iPhone and Dick Tracey’s two-way wrist watch, you probably aren’t part of the target demographic for hi-tech consumer gadgets. But don’t despair. The more technology advances, the simpler it becomes to operate. Ever increasing interaction is the ultimate goal of the gadget designers (i.e. the phone that talks back to you). Unfortunately, while the technology currently exists to increase user interaction significantly, just like previous decades, we’ll have to wait as they slowly market and sell us each new version.
Chasing hi-tech gadgets is a young persons game. Be glad you can both use a calculator and do the math long hand. You’ll have a fighting chase when the grid goes black.
Check it out